Nairobi, Kenya — The inaugural Africa Events Summit opened at the Argyle Grand Hotel on 10th September 2026 with an unusually blunt diagnosis of an industry that has, for years, punched below its weight: East Africa’s events sector does not have a talent problem, or an idea problem. It has a connection problem.

That was the framing offered by Ian Migwi, founder of Billion Events and convenor of the summit, in his welcome address to delegates who had travelled in from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. “We are not lacking on ideas. We are not lacking on solutions. We are not lacking on talent,” he told the room. “What we have is we have a connection problem.”

Table of Contents

• Kenya Tourism Board Opens the Africa Events Summit
• A Region Big Enough, Acting Too Small
• The Private Sector Responds
• Security Takes Centre Stage
• What Comes Next for the Africa Events Summit

Kenya Tourism Board Opens the Africa Events Summit

The Kenya Tourism Board’s CEO, June Chepkemei, was unable to attend in person, so the opening address at the Africa Events Summit fell to Fiona Ngesa, KTB’s Market Development Lead. Her remarks set the tone for two days of conversation that organisers had explicitly built around one theme: Building Africa’s Event Economy: Decisions. Direction. Alignment.

Ngesa laid out a statistic that many in the room had not heard framed quite so starkly: Africa currently captures only around 5% of global tourism, and East Africa’s share of that is closer to 2%. Kenya, she noted, is not struggling for recognition — destination awareness has sat above 80% for over a decade. The problem is what happens after people know the destination exists.

“The conversation we are having now is beyond awareness,” Ngesa told delegates. “How do you convert that 80% to conversion?”

She pointed to MICE and business travel — conferences, incentive trips, corporate events — as one of the clearest levers available, noting that business travel already accounts for roughly 23–25% of arrivals into Kenya from Asian markets. It was a figure that reframed the entire summit: this was not a gathering about parties and productions, but about a measurable slice of the tourism economy that East Africa has not yet learned to fully capture.

A Region Big Enough, Acting Too Small

If Ngesa’s numbers gave the summit its economic case, Migwi’s welcome address gave it its emotional one. Using an extended metaphor about a family eating from the same table, he described an industry that competes internally instead of growing the market together.

“We were all children of the same mother eating from the same table,” he said. “The food is enough for all of us. But the problem you’re having is that someone wants to eat breakfast, they want to eat dinner, they want to eat lunch all at the same time. And instead of taking care of that table, we are snatching away the table.”

He extended the argument regionally: “If you look at us as a region, we are very big as a region. But we keep operating as a country.” It’s a line that would resurface, in different forms, across nearly every session that followed — from the opening panel to the closing address two days later.

Migwi was careful to frame the Africa Events Summit itself as a starting point rather than an answer. “AES is not created because I believe I have all the answers, or I believe Billion Events have all the answers,” he said. “No single company actually has those answers… The idea was to create a room where people who are actually building this industry could come together and start finding those answers collectively.”

The Private Sector Responds

The Opening Panel — moderated by MC Ian Muiruri, CEO of Riannu Entertainment — carried that call for unity into harder commercial territory. Zaheeda Suleman, CEO of The Be Experience Company, cited Safaricom’s “Kenya Live” campaign as proof of what disciplined investment can do: a KSh 220 million outlay that moved average revenue per user from roughly 100 to 425 shillings. Her challenge to the room was direct — stop positioning as service providers, and start operating as value givers.

Eric Mwanzia, Managing Director of The Arts Group and Chairman of EMAK, brought scale to the conversation: 12,000 business events and 683,000 business travellers recorded last year, with the industry now targeting 15,000 events and 780,000 travellers. He also confirmed something delegates had been anticipating — a new Class G licensing requirement for event management companies, alongside a Ministry of Interior working group drafting national event security standards for Cabinet review.

Trust, or the lack of it, was raised independently by several voices across the floor — Harold Mnkheni, Khalhani Sichangi, Peter Igaga from Uganda, and security operators including Elsie of AVSIE and Immaculate of BM Security all pointed to undercutting and inconsistent standards as the quiet tax the industry pays on itself.

Security Takes Centre Stage

One of the most concrete sessions of the day came from Kingsley Litali, CEO of Crimeshield Security, whose masterclass reframed event safety as a design discipline rather than an afterthought. “Security always comes as a third wheel,” he told delegates, “yet the first person you meet at any event is a security personnel.”

Litali introduced the DIM-ICE framework — Design, Information, Management, mapped against Ingress, Circulation and Egress — and grounded it in a real case study from the KICC World Cup Watch Party: over 10,000 attendees, 54 recovered phones, and a single, cleanly managed medical evacuation. “Crowds don’t become dangerous because they are large,” he said. “They become dangerous when systems fail to keep pace with their growth.”

He closed with a line that captured the summit’s underlying ambition: “We have already proved Africa can fill the stadiums and arenas. The next challenge is proving we can protect everyone inside them.”

What Comes Next for the Africa Events Summit

By the end of the first day, a handful of themes had surfaced independently across nearly every session — the silo problem, the need for shared standards, the trust deficit between operators, and the shift from chasing awareness to chasing conversion. Organisers say those themes will directly inform the summit’s next phase: a proposed AES East Africa Chapter, an industry association intended to house shared tools like an Event Management Plan template and a Safety Advisory panel, open first to founding members who attended the 2026 edition.

For an industry that gathered, by its own admission, to solve a connection problem, the first fix may simply have been the room itself.

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The Africa Events Summit was held 10–11 September 2026 at the Argyle Grand Hotel, Nairobi, organised by Billion Events. For membership enquiries into the AES East Africa Chapter, contact aes@billioneventsea.com. Further reading: Kenya Tourism Board and the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife.