Nine days from now, the executives who shape African aviation’s commercial future will be in the same room. The 2026 IATA Focus Africa Conference opens in Addis Ababa on 29 April, hosted by Ethiopian Airlines, and the full programme makes one thing clear: this is not a celebration of progress. It is a reckoning with how much still needs to change.
The headline theme — Elevating Aviation Safety, Connectivity, and Operational Efficiency in Africa — understates what is actually on the agenda. Day 2 is structured almost entirely around distribution modernisation and payments, two areas where African aviation’s ambitions and its operational realities remain furthest apart.
The retailing sessions that matter most
The morning of 30 April opens with Diala Halaseh, IATA’s Regional Head of Distribution and Payment for Africa and the Middle East, presenting an overview of the Billing and Settlement Plan. The session is positioned as introductory, but its placement at the top of Day 2 signals its importance. BSP infrastructure is the financial backbone of airline-agent settlement across the continent, and in markets where card rails are unreliable and agent liquidity is precarious, how and when settlement happens is a survival question, not an administrative one.
From there, Halaseh moves directly into a one-on-one interview with Julius Thairu, Kenya Airways’ Chief Commercial and Customer Officer, on the evolution of modern airline retailing in Africa. Kenya Airways is among the few African carriers with live NDC capability on the Amadeus Travel Platform. Thairu’s presence signals that this conversation will be grounded in operational experience, not theory. The session draws on IATA’s Airline Retailing Consortium framework, reinforcing that IATA is positioning Offers and Orders not as an eventual aspiration but as a commercial decision African carriers need to make now.
The panel that follows is the most consequential distribution session in the programme. Thairu is joined by Adenike Macaulay, CEO of Wakanow, one of West Africa’s largest OTAs, and Alem Bayu, Ethiopian Airlines’ Director of Distribution and Corporate Sales. The combination is well-chosen. Ethiopian Airlines operates one of the most advanced NDC and ancillary retailing programmes on the continent. Wakanow aggregates demand across multiple African markets and has to reconcile that with the fragmented content and inconsistent booking workflows that NDC transition creates at the seller level. The panel is built explicitly around real-world experience: what has delivered results, where collaboration across airlines, aggregators, and travel sellers has broken down, and what closing that gap would require.
The payments session that closes the morning brings financial infrastructure into direct contact with distribution. Moderated by IATA’s Manal Al-Taher, the panel features Paul Mutethia from Network International, Christine Kitale of the Fintech Association of Kenya, and Bayu again from Ethiopian Airlines. The framing is correct. Payment friction is frequently the reason NDC adoption stalls at the travel seller level. Agents lack the settlement mechanisms and, in many cases, the working capital to transact efficiently under new booking flows. Keeping payments and distribution on the same stage, rather than treating them as separate problems, reflects a more accurate diagnosis of where implementation barriers actually sit in African markets.
Day 1: familiar debates, sharper stakes
The first day is built around questions African aviation has been asking for a decade. What is different this year is the quality of the people being asked to answer them.
The opening ecosystem panel, moderated by IATA Regional Vice President Kamil Alawadhi, brings together Nigeria’s Minister of Aviation Festus Keyamo, AFRAA Secretary General Abderahmane Berthe, Ethiopian Airlines CEO Mesfin Tasew, and Airports Company South Africa CEO Mpumi Mpofu. The panel’s stated aim is to examine how collaboration across governments, regulators, and industry can overcome fragmentation and unlock investment. Nigeria’s ministerial presence is the variable worth watching. Whether it reflects genuine policy intent or conference attendance will become clear quickly.
The afternoon investment panel is more concrete in its scope. Kenya Airways’ Acting CEO George Kamal, Airlink CEO De Villiers Engelbrecht, a World Bank transport economist, and AFCAC Secretary General Adefunke Adeyemi are assembled to address the financing and regulatory conditions that determine whether African carriers can access the capital needed to grow. Engelbrecht brings a distinct perspective. Airlink has built one of the most extensive intra-African route networks without the fleet scale or government backing of the continent’s flag carriers. Its commercial trajectory offers a different kind of evidence about what is achievable under genuine market constraints.
The fleet expansion session confronts what the programme calls the growth paradox. The global fleet is expected to nearly double by 2044, and Africa’s requirement grows proportionally. But African carriers continue to absorb risk premiums from lessors and insurers, face weak appetite from international financiers, and carry maintenance costs inflated by a fragile regional supply chain. Airbus, Boeing, and Embraer are all on the panel. Whether that produces an honest exchange about pricing and risk appetite, or a managed one, will say something about how seriously the OEMs are engaging with the African market’s structural constraints rather than its growth projections.
Day 1 closes with a tourism and connectivity session that includes Manzi Kayihura, Executive Chairman of Wilderness Rwanda, among its panelists. Rwanda’s emergence as a high-value tourism destination has been deliberate and well-documented. Its presence at an IATA continental aviation conference reflects how thoroughly that positioning has landed.
Efficiency as a cost argument
The afternoon of Day 2 shifts to operational efficiency and safety. The programme is unusually direct about the efficiency challenge: Africa carries some of the highest aviation charges, taxes, and fees in the world. The session brings together Kenya Airways, Embraer, Astral Aviation’s Sanjeev Gadhia, and Saudi Ground Services to examine how airlines, airports, governments, and air navigation providers can collectively reduce that burden. Gadhia is one of the more plainspoken voices in African commercial aviation. His presence suggests the conversation may not stay diplomatic.
The conference closes with a safety session centred on IATA’s Collaborative Aviation Safety Improvement Program for Africa. CASIP has produced real gains in safety oversight since its launch, but the continent’s underlying constraints — regulatory fragmentation, limited state surveillance capacity, chronically underfunded civil aviation authorities — are structural. The session will not resolve them. What it can do is clarify where the programme has built genuine traction and where resistance remains hardest.
The payments thread
The most deliberate editorial decision in this year’s programme is the treatment of payments and settlement as distribution issues rather than back-office functions. The BSP session, the payments panel, and the presence of fintech and financial infrastructure voices alongside airline distribution executives reflect a hard-won understanding: the Offers and Orders transition in Africa cannot be measured through technology adoption metrics alone.
The financial infrastructure underneath modern retailing — how agents are capitalised, how airlines receive settlement, how payment options reach the end traveller — determines whether NDC reaches African markets at scale or remains concentrated among a small number of well-resourced carriers operating in gateway cities. IATA appears to have absorbed that lesson. The question Addis Ababa will begin to answer is whether the industry has too.
IATA Focus Africa 2026 takes place on 29-30 April in Addis Ababa, hosted by Ethiopian Airlines. Full programme details are available at iata.org.
