Gabon made its first appearance at the 2026 Akwaaba African Travel Market in Lagos, with Beyond Afrika MD/CEO Grace Ntahinta Mboumba using the platform to promote the country’s biodiversity, culture and hospitality while calling for stronger intra-African travel and business partnerships.
For Grace Ntahinta Mboumba, the 2026 Akwaaba African Travel Market was more than another tourism exhibition. It was an opportunity to introduce Gabon to a wider Nigerian and African travel audience and begin building relationships that could translate into visitors, investment and new business opportunities.
Mboumba, Managing Director/CEO of Beyond Afrika Travel Highlights Gabon and Governor of the Gabon International Expo, was attending Akwaaba for the first time.
She said she discovered the event through tourism colleagues she met in Cameroon, including Agatha, CEO of Flora Travel & Tours, and saw it as an important platform for Gabon to strengthen its visibility within the African tourism market.
“We are here to build our position and hope to achieve more visibility for Gabon and more partnership for Africa, more business opportunities for Africa,” she said.
For a country that is still relatively unfamiliar to many African travellers, Mboumba sees destination visibility as one of the industry’s most important challenges.
Selling Gabon Beyond Its Natural Beauty
Gabon possesses a tourism proposition built heavily around nature and biodiversity, but Mboumba believes the country’s appeal goes beyond individual attractions.
She identified hospitality, authenticity, culture, atmosphere, beaches, environment, and nature as some of the elements that can shape a visitor’s experience.
Gabon is often described in tourism circles as “Africa’s Last Eden,” a positioning that reflects the country’s natural environment and biodiversity.
But Mboumba’s argument is that the country needs travellers to experience that proposition for themselves.
“Gabon is an amazing and beautiful country,” she said, emphasising that the destination has opportunities for leisure travellers looking for something different within Africa.
For the Nigerian market in particular, she sees considerable potential in beach holidays and leisure travel.
Gabon has accommodation businesses located around its coastal areas, and increased visitor numbers could create wider economic benefits for those businesses and the communities around them.
Mboumba believes that stronger tourism flows could increase revenue for local lodges, create employment and generate economic activity beyond the hospitality establishments themselves.
Why Should Africans Travel to Gabon?
The question of why an African traveller should choose another African destination is central to Mboumba’s message.
Her answer begins with a simple principle: Africans need to travel within Africa.
“First of all, because it’s Africa. We need to start visiting Africa, travelling within Africa,” she said.
But she also believes that every African destination has something distinctive to offer.
For Gabon, that includes its hospitality and the opportunity to experience a culture and environment that may be unfamiliar even to travellers from neighbouring countries.
Mboumba used her own experience in Nigeria to illustrate the point.
Before visiting Nigeria, she said, her perception had been influenced partly by what she encountered through the media. Once she arrived and interacted with Nigerians directly, her understanding changed.
Her experience, she argued, demonstrates why physical travel matters.
“You need to come and explore. It will open your mind,” she said.
The same principle, she believes, should apply to Gabon.
Rather than allowing perceptions about African countries to be shaped exclusively by distant or negative narratives, tourism can give people an opportunity to experience destinations, cultures and communities directly.
From Perception to Pan-African Tourism
For Mboumba, that experience is connected to a larger ambition: encouraging Africans to celebrate one another’s cultures and hospitality.
She believes countries across the continent should do more to promote their destinations to fellow Africans, not only to international visitors from outside the continent.
Her experience in Nigeria reinforced the importance of understanding cultural context.
She described the warmth and generosity she encountered in Nigeria as something that could potentially be misunderstood by visitors unfamiliar with the country’s social culture.
That, she said, is precisely why travel matters.
The same applies to Gabon, where she wants visitors to move beyond assumptions and discover the warmth and hospitality of its people.
“Sometimes you hear people saying that Gabonese people have got egos and stuff. No! You need to come and experience Gabonese. You will see that we’ve got a big heart. And we love people, we love foreigners,” she said.
Akwaaba Opens a New Door for Gabon
The response to Gabon’s first Akwaaba appearance appears to have strengthened Mboumba’s belief in the value of African tourism exhibitions.
By the second day, she said more than 50 people had visited the Gabon stand — a level of engagement she described as unprecedented in her experience at tourism shows.
More importantly, she said visitors were curious.
“They are very keen on discovering Gabon,” she said. “They want to know what’s there. It’s a new destination.”
That curiosity is precisely what Gabon’s participation was intended to generate.
The objective was to increase visibility, introduce the destination to new markets and create opportunities for partnerships.
A New Chapter for Gabon Tourism
Gabon’s debut at Akwaaba also carries significance beyond one exhibition.
As African tourism increasingly looks toward intra-African travel, destinations that remain relatively underrepresented in major regional tourism marketplaces have an opportunity to build new audiences.
Mboumba’s strategy is built around making Gabon visible, accessible and better understood by fellow Africans.
For her, tourism is not simply about moving visitors from one country to another. It is also about changing perceptions, creating business relationships, supporting local economies and encouraging Africans to discover the continent for themselves.
Her Akwaaba debut has given Gabon a new platform in Nigeria.
The next challenge will be turning the interest generated in Lagos into actual travel, partnerships and sustained business connections.
If that happens, the country’s “Last Eden” identity may increasingly become not just a description of Gabon’s natural environment, but an invitation to African travellers to discover a destination that many have yet to experience.
By: SAM Opoku
