Online Reporter
Tourism Branding
with
Charles Mavhunga
Great destinations are not built on landscapes alone. They are built on the people who give those landscapes meaning: the guides who interpret the wild, the hosts who translate culture into experience, the entrepreneurs who transform community assets into world-class products.
In Africa, that foundational human layer is overwhelmingly female. Sixty-nine percent of the continent’s hospitality and tourism workforce are women. And yet the faces at the top of Africa’s tourism brand: on boards, in ministries, in executive suites: tell a different story.
That gap is not merely a justice issue. It is a branding crisis. And Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, is where Africa begins to resolve it.
The Identity Gap at the Heart of African Tourism
Every serious destination brand rests on an honest relationship between its identity and its reality. When that relationship fractures: when what a destination says about itself diverges from what visitors actually encounter, the brand weakens. Africa’s tourism brand faces precisely this fracture.
The continent markets itself on authenticity, community and human connection. Its lodges sell the warmth of local culture. Its conservation experiences are built on community guardianship. Its culinary offerings draw on generations of knowledge held and transmitted by women.
Yet the institutional architecture of the industry remains male-dominated. Fewer than one in eight tourism CEOs across the continent are women, and female representation in ministerial tourism offices and national tourism councils sits at or below 20 percent. “The result is a brand that speaks community but practises exclusion, and that is not a sustainable destination proposition.”
A sector that sells Africa’s human richness while concentrating its returns and its decision-making in a narrow demographic is not a sector operating at its full brand potential.
The most sophisticated investors and destination partners increasingly know it.
What Inclusive Leadership Does for a Destination Brand?
The business case is no longer theoretical. Destinations and enterprises that have deliberately built women into ownership and leadership consistently outperform on the metrics that define durable brand strength: income equity, environmental stewardship, community benefit retention and resilience to economic shock.
Rwanda’s post-pandemic tourism recovery, one of the fastest on the continent, is anchored by a sector that achieved board-level gender parity in its development authority as early as 2019.
Namibia’s community conservancy tourism model, widely regarded as a global benchmark in sustainable destination development, has produced a disproportionate share of female enterprise leaders because it was designed from the outset to channel economic agency to community women. These are not coincidences. They are brand outcomes. Structural design that includes women in ownership and leadership produces destinations that are more authentic, more resilient and more compelling in the global marketplace.
For destination marketing organisations across Africa, this is the strategic insight that changes everything: gender-equitable tourism systems do not simply perform better ethically. They perform better commercially.
Victoria Falls 2026: A Statement of Brand Intent
Against this backdrop, the Second UN Tourism Regional Congress on Women’s Empowerment in Tourism in Africa convenes at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, from April 29 to May 1, 2026.
Jointly organised by UN Tourism and the Ministry of Tourism and Hospitality Industry of Zimbabwe, the congress is itself a branding act: it positions Zimbabwe and Victoria Falls, specifically, as the epicentre of Africa’s most consequential tourism leadership conversation.
The location is not incidental. Victoria Falls is one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, the flagship asset of Zimbabwe`s US$1,2 billion tourism economy, and one of the five most recognised tourism brands in sub-Saharan Africa.
Through hosting a congress of this institutional weight, Zimbabwe signals that its tourism ambition extends beyond arrivals and revenue: into the architecture of a sector that is equitable, innovative, and globally competitive. What distinguishes this congress from prior gender-in-tourism conventions is the precision of its mandate. This is not a gathering organised around aspiration. It is organised around structural transformation.
The agenda moves decisively beyond skills workshops and microfinance schemes toward the construction of institutional frameworks: gender-responsive licencing criteria, board composition requirements, procurement policies that prefer women-owned enterprises and monitoring mechanisms built for rigour.
Policy commitments made here carry international accountability and can be directly integrated into Zimbabwe`s Tourism Master Plan and the investment criteria of the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority.
Redesigning Who Tells the Story
At its most fundamental level, tourism branding is an act of storytelling. It is the construction of a narrative about a place: what it offers, what it values, who belongs there, and what kind of encounter it makes possible. For too long, Africa’s tourism story has been told from the top of an industry that does not reflect the community at its base.When women move from the workforce into leadership: into the rooms where brand strategy is set, where investment decisions are made, where destination identity is articulated: the story changes.
It becomes more layered, more honest, and more competitive. It attracts the traveller who is seeking a genuine encounter rather than a curated spectacle.
It builds the kind of destination loyalty that no marketing budget alone can manufacture.
The transport industries: aviation, maritime tourism, rail, and ground transportation, represent a further frontier. Among the most male-dominated subsectors in tourism globally, they have received far less policy attention than accommodation and hospitality. The congress will receive findings from a major UN Tourism global report on women in these industries, expanding the canvas of the gender-and-tourism conversation to the full visitor journey.
Conclusion: The Future of the Brand
As the opening ceremony unfolds on 29 April 2026, with the roar of Victoria Falls as its permanent underscore, Africa will be engaged in something historically significant: a formal, institutional assertion that the future of its tourism brand must be shaped by those who have always been its foundation.
The Second UN Tourism Regional Congress on Women’s Empowerment in Tourism in Africa is a serious, technically grounded effort to redesign who holds power in a US$1,9 trillion global industry at its African axis. The ambition is systemic change. The mechanism is institutional design. And for any destination serious about what its brand actually means, the timeline is now.
Tourism, at its deepest level, has always been about encounters: between traveller and place, between visitor and community, between the world as it is and the world as it might be. The women who facilitate that encounter have earned an equal claim on its direction. Victoria Falls 2026 is where that claim becomes architecture.
Charles Mavhunga co-authored textbooks in Business Entrepreneurial Skills and is currently studying for a PhD in Management at Bindura University. He can be contacted at [email protected]. Cell:0772989816
Peter Tanyanyiwa