How AfrikaZiara is helping to bring tourism operators in Africa online

At AfrikaZiara, we’re all graduates of the MEST Africa training program. As part of the program, we were required to come up with innovative solutions to solve Pan-African problems. In the process of ideating, we asked ourselves: “What is the one problem that if we solve it, will not only impact the whole of Africa but create a lot of wealth not only for ourselves but for those impacted by our solution as well?”
The tourism industry was a common interest as we have all had experience in the industry, so we chose to solve a problem no one has looked at. We researched how tourism enterprises in Africa market themselves online to attract tourists and found a shocking lack of effective online marketing. We found more than 35,000 tourism enterprises in Africa who are struggling to sell online, whereas almost every tourist coming into Africa makes their travel bookings online. So we thought of how we could give these tourism enterprise owners access to the digital marketing skills and resources they were missing.

At Ziara, our SaaS tool enables these local tourism enterprise owners to create and maintain an effective online presence on more than 13,000 travel agency sites globally that tourists use to book travel products and services.
We’ve grown rapidly in the past six months as we’ve moved from idea stage to having a paying customer within such a short period of time. In April when we launched the BETA test version of our SaaS solution, we only marketed it to tour operators in Kenya and South Africa, but thanks to social media engagement and referrals, we signed up BETA testers from South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana and Namibia. This made us a Pan-African Travel-tech startup even before we imagined it.
The biggest challenge has been not having enough capital to operate our startup. Despite not receiving seed funding, the times have ultimately strengthened us to become even better entrepreneurs.

We are a team with vision. Five years from now, we see AfrikaZiara becoming the biggest Travel-tech innovation company across Africa with a multi-purpose SaaS tool for Tourism Enterprises to do data-driven marketing. We also aim to become government’s leading provider of Travel-tech consultancy as well as digital travel shoppers data and trends.
