There is a pattern playing out across African aviation that nobody wants to say plainly. An airline announces NDC capability. A press release goes out. An IATA badge gets updated. And then, quietly, nothing changes. The same tickets move through the same GDS pipes, at the same fares, with the same ancillary blind spots that NDC was supposed to fix.
This is not a technology problem. It is four problems at once, and until the industry addresses all four, the announcements will keep outpacing the results.
The compliance theatre problem
NDC adoption targets have created a perverse incentive. Airlines are measured on whether they have NDC capability, not on whether that capability generates revenue. The result is a generation of NDC implementations built for certification, not commerce. An airline can achieve Level 4 certification with a handful of API connections that no agency in its home market can actually access. The number looks right on a slide deck. The distribution reality is unchanged.
This is not unique to Africa, but the continent’s airlines face it more acutely. Smaller network carriers do not have the negotiating leverage to compel agency adoption. They cannot threaten to pull inventory. They announce, they certify, and they wait for an ecosystem shift that is not coming on its own.
The ecosystem readiness problem
Even where airlines have built credible NDC pipes, the demand side is not ready to receive them and much of that comes down to incentives. Africa’s travel agency landscape remains heavily dependent on GDS tooling, and agencies have rational reasons to stay there. NDC introduces additional workflow complexity, multiple booking environments, and staff retraining costs. Unless airlines are offering exclusive fares, meaningful commission structures, or ancillary content that genuinely cannot be booked any other way, agencies will keep doing what works. Most African carriers are not yet making that commercial case clearly enough, which means the ecosystem has no compelling reason to absorb the disruption.
The aggregators and technology intermediaries who should bridge this gap are thin on the ground. The handful of NDC-capable aggregators operating across African markets cover a fraction of the distribution footprint that GDS incumbents have built over decades. An airline with genuine NDC ambition has to choose between waiting for the ecosystem to mature or subsidising its own channel development. Most do neither.
The payments problem
An NDC connection is only commercially useful if the agency can settle transactions efficiently. This is where a structural barrier that rarely features in distribution conversations becomes decisive. Many agencies across African markets operate with limited access to virtual cards, face foreign exchange restrictions, work under BSP cash-flow pressures, and sit within fragmented acquiring infrastructure. Even an agency that wants to book NDC content may find the payment rails too unreliable or too costly to make it worthwhile. Distribution technology built without a payments solution underneath it is incomplete architecture. Until settlement works as smoothly as the API, transaction volumes will remain thin.
The IT sustainability problem
NDC is not a project. It is a programme. It requires ongoing schema updates, API maintenance, offer and order management capability, and staff who understand what they are maintaining. For a carrier operating with a lean IT team and competing infrastructure priorities, NDC becomes the thing that works until it quietly doesn’t.
What looks like adoption from the outside is sometimes a connection that has degraded, a feed that hasn’t been updated in two cycles, or a capability that exists in test environments and never reached production traffic. There is no public accountability for this. No one publishes NDC uptime figures. The certification stays on the website long after the practical reality has drifted.
What would actually change this
The four problems reinforce each other, which is why incremental fixes fail. Compliance frameworks that measure transaction volume rather than API existence would force airlines to close the loop between announcement and commerce. Aggregator investment — from IATA, from development finance, from the carriers themselves — would give the ecosystem the tooling it needs to absorb NDC supply. Payments infrastructure has to be treated as part of the distribution stack, not a separate problem for someone else to solve. And airlines that want agency adoption have to lead with commercial incentives, not connectivity arguments.
Africa’s aviation market is growing. The distribution infrastructure underneath it is not keeping pace. NDC, done properly, is part of the answer.
The next phase of African NDC should not be measured by how many airlines have APIs. It should be measured by how many bookings flow through them. Until transaction volume becomes the metric that matters, the industry risks confusing connectivity with distribution transformation.
