Is East Africa safe for corporate groups?

What we tell planners

Corporate groups run incentives, boards and conferences across Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, Zanzibar, Seychelles and Mauritius every week of the year. Safety for an incentive house is not a yes/no about a continent. It is whether the DMC has named vehicles and guides, night-driving rules, lodge and hospital maps, flying-doctor or equivalent evacuation where that is the right tool, skipper certificates on boats, fitness gates on gorilla and Kilimanjaro days, and a 24-hour operations number that answers.

The risk picture changes by product. Nairobi, Kigali, Kampala, Addis, Mahé and Mauritius resorts are city or island hotel security plus normal urban briefings. Conservancy and park vehicles, crater roads, Bwindi approaches and Simien walks are a different protocol. We keep a rooming list with emergency contacts. We change northern historic-circuit routing in Ethiopia rather than improvise through an unsafe week. Mauritius summer programmes include a cyclone clause. We do not treat a memorial visit in Kigali or a church morning in Lalibela as a costume stop.

What we will not do: promise that nothing can go wrong; hide malaria, altitude or yellow-fever logic; put 40 people on a boat without a second-vessel note; or run a night transfer because the gala overran. Ask to see the operations annex in the proposal. If a supplier answers ‘Africa is perfectly safe’ or ‘Africa is too dangerous,’ they are not briefing your duty-of-care committee.