Dr. Vera Kamtukule on digital discoverability, leadership, and Africa’s tourism future
In a recent Executive INSIGHTS interview with Stephene Chikozho, Chief Executive Officer of Africa INSIGHTS, Dr. Vera Kamtukule reflected on a growing challenge for African tourism: the continent may have extraordinary destinations, culture, hospitality, and experiences, but too much of that value remains digitally invisible.
The conversation focused on digital tourism redesign, artificial intelligence, destination discoverability, and executive leadership.
One example captured the problem clearly. Dr. Kamtukule shared the case of a 100-room property in Malawi operating at approximately 10 percent occupancy—not because of poor infrastructure, pricing, or service, but because potential visitors could barely discover it online.
As artificial intelligence increasingly influences how travellers research, compare, and select destinations, digital visibility is becoming part of tourism infrastructure itself.
For African destinations, this creates both a challenge and an opportunity.
From Tourism Promotion to Digital Positioning
Dr. Kamtukule argued that African tourism must move beyond traditional destination promotion toward deliberate digital positioning.
For decades, much of the information surfaced about African destinations online has been generated, organised, and interpreted by actors outside the continent. Search engines, booking platforms, international tour operators, and now generative AI systems increasingly shape how travellers understand African destinations.
If local businesses, tourism institutions, cultural organisations, and communities do not create authoritative digital information about themselves, others will continue to define them.
The challenge therefore extends well beyond national tourism campaigns.
A lodge in Likoma, a guide in Mulanje, a cultural enterprise in Dedza, or a community tourism operator elsewhere on the continent must also be digitally visible.
African tourism, Dr. Kamtukule noted, cannot realise its full economic potential if the businesses and experiences that constitute the sector remain absent from the digital systems through which global travellers increasingly make decisions.
Africa Must Shape the Data That Shapes Its Image
Artificial intelligence depends on the information available to it.
That reality places renewed importance on the creation of accurate, locally generated digital content about African destinations, businesses, communities, and experiences.
Dr. Kamtukule’s argument is ultimately one of digital agency: African countries must become active producers of the information that shapes how the continent is represented and discovered.
That means investing in digital capacity not only at the level of government and major hotel groups, but across the tourism value chain.
The objective is not to replace the human character of African tourism with technology. Rather, technology should reduce friction around discovery, booking, administration, and communication so that people can focus on what technology cannot reproduce: hospitality, culture, connection, and lived experience.
The Leadership Question Behind Digital Transformation
The conversation also moved beyond tourism into a broader question of executive leadership.
Dr. Kamtukule reflected on the enormous responsibilities carried by people who enter senior public leadership positions. Doctors, engineers, accountants, and other professionals often spend years preparing technically for their professions, yet individuals can enter some of the most consequential leadership roles in society with comparatively little structured preparation for the complexity of those positions.
Her experience in Cabinet reinforced a conviction that leadership requires more than technical competence or political appointment. It requires preparation for decision-making, institutional complexity, competing interests, public accountability, limited resources, and the human consequences of executive choices.
This leadership preparation challenge is now central to her work through The Leadership Lab, where she is building conversations around governance, executive leadership, public service, institutional effectiveness, and the preparation of the next generation of African leaders.
Connecting Leadership, Technology and Economic Growth
For Dr. Kamtukule, the tourism and leadership conversations ultimately converge.
Digital transformation requires institutions capable of implementing it.
Tourism growth requires leadership capable of understanding the relationships between infrastructure, technology, enterprise, culture, investment, and community participation.
And Africa’s ability to benefit from artificial intelligence will depend not simply on access to new tools, but on whether its leaders can create systems that allow people and businesses to use those tools productively.
Her central message is therefore not that technology will transform Africa automatically.
It is that Africa must intentionally build the leadership, institutions, digital visibility, and local capacity required to shape that transformation.
The full Executive INSIGHTS conversation explores Dr. Kamtukule’s journey from civil society and executive leadership into Cabinet, the realities of leading within government, Africa’s digital tourism opportunity, AI discoverability, and the leadership preparation challenge facing the continent.
Stephene Chikozho → LinkedIn profile
Africa INSIGHTS → Africa INSIGHTS LinkedIn
Africa INSIGHTS platform → africainsights.io
Dr. Vera Kamtukule → Vera’s LinkedIn profile
Full Executive INSIGHTS interview → Read the full interview
The Leadership Lab → Leadership Lab Substack
Dr. Vera’s website → verakamtukule.com
