Author: Wayne Godwin

For decades, tourism has remained a major contributor to the GDP of African economies. In 2019, the industry accounted for about seven percent of Africa’s GDP and contributed $169 billion to its economy—about the size of Côte d’Ivoire’s and Kenya’s combined GDP. But the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic changed all that. In July 2020, the African Union estimated that Africa lost nearly $55 billion in travel and tourism revenues and two million jobs in only the first three months of the pandemic. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted that real GDP among African countries dependent on tourism shrunk by…