African Aviation Has Many Complications Including a Lack of Volume
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Despite an enormous pool of potential passengers, Africa’s low-cost market has yet to take off. Are restrictive bilateral agreements to blame, or is something else going on here? For many airlines, the numbers just don’t add up.
Editor's Note: Skift launched a new series, Gateway, as we broaden our news coverage geographically with first-hand, original stories from correspondents embedded in cities around the world.
We are featuring regular reports several times per week from Beijing, Singapore, Caracas and Cape Town, and look for us to add other cities soon. Gateway Singapore, for example, signifies that the reporter is writing from that city although her coverage of the business of travel will meander to other locales in the region. Read about the series here, and check out all the stories in the series here.
First there was the Yamoussoukro Declaration of 1988, which opened the door to liberalising African skies. A decade later it became the Yamoussoukro Decision. In 2012, the Abuja Declaration gathered similar amounts of dust.
The road to "open skies" in Africa has been paved with decades of bureaucratic paperwork. The continent is home to 12 percent of the world’s population, yet it accounts for just three percent of its airli
