‘Many African airports operate 50% less capacity’

• Attributes poor performance to high charges

Senior Lecturer at Digital Marketing and Tourism at the University of Bedfordshire, Dr Augusta Evans, has stated that many of Africa’s airports are operating less than 50% of their total capacity.

This, she said, is contained in the 2022 report of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).

This significant underutilisation, she said, is driven by several interconnected factors that hinder the growth of the continent’s aviation sector.

ICAO, she noted, attributes poor airport performance largely to the prohibitive cost of air travel in Africa, adding that these high costs are exacerbated by excessive airport facility fees and navigation charges that are often well above global averages.

In her presentation at the African Travel Commission (ATC) meeting convened by the ATC Executive Director, Dr Lucky George, with the theme “Affordable Aviation as Strategic Enabler of African tourism and Regional Development through the Lens of SAATM”, held in Lagos recently, she said a 2023 gap analysis identified a lack of airport certification and master plans as major hurdles.

According to her, “Many African airports lag behind in digitalisation, often treating facilities more like border posts than business environments. This leads to inefficiencies, such as the inability to provide mobile boarding passes or long immigration queues.”

“To address these issues, the African Union has initiated a $30 billion aviation modernisation initiative. Additionally, while the average passenger load factor in Africa was 71.5% in 2022—an improvement but still below the global average—traffic is forecasted to double by 2043, potentially increasing the demand for these underutilised facilities.”

The senior lecturer with over 15 years’ experience in higher education, tourism, and digital strategy noted that for affordable flights to truly transform African connectivity, they cannot exist in a vacuum; they must be part of an integrated intermodal transport system where road and rail access are as seamless as the flight itself.

She emphasised that for the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) to move beyond a signed treaty into reality, member states must harmonise aviation ground operations.

The “open sky”, she said, doesn’t work if the ground remains prohibitively expensive or bogged down by local monopolies, lamenting that one of the greatest deterrents to SAATM is the lack of parity in airport taxes.

In many African regions, airport charges and navigation fees, she reiterated, are significantly higher than the global average, often making up nearly half the cost of a regional ticket.

Evans pointed out that states must stop treating airports as primary cash cows for the national treasury and instead see them as economic facilitators.

SAATM, according to her, requires a shift toward transparent, cost-related, and non-discriminatory user charges to ensure a level playing field for all African carriers, not just the home airline.

Liberalisation, she said, fails if foreign African airlines face invisible barriers that local carriers do not.

“Ground handling (fueling, baggage, cleaning, and catering) is often a hidden monopoly that inflates operational costs. In many African airports, a single state-sanctioned company controls ground handling, leading to high prices and poor service quality.”

She further stated that allowing multiple ground handling service providers creates the competition necessary to drive down airline costs, which can then be passed on to passengers as lower fares. Aligning these services also involves modernising the technology behind them—moving away from “border post” mentalities toward efficient, digitalised business environments.”

On the SAATM implementation gap, Evans stated that while 38 states have committed to these principles, the 2023 gap analysis shows that many airports still lack the necessary airport certification and master plans to support this level of integration.

Wole Shadare