Lifestyle – Hospitality & Tourism · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026

Nightlife stages are seldom built with access in mind, on either side of the booth. The GIMC Afro Tech show in June 2026 sets out to test that, featuring wheelchair-using DJ Kabila and women DJs alongside calls for accessible venues and travel-and-accommodation packages.

Putting a wheelchair-using DJ and a line-up of women on the decks is a direct answer to who usually gets to perform. It widens the picture of who belongs behind the controls without turning the night into a lecture about it – the representation does its work simply by being on the bill.

Access as Infrastructure

The encouragement of accessible venues and travel-and-accommodation packages is the part with reach beyond one show. A booth a wheelchair user can reach, and a venue an audience can move through, are physical commitments that outlast a single event and apply to every act that follows. They also widen the paying crowd a venue can serve, which is the commercial case sitting quietly beneath the inclusion one: an inaccessible room turns away ticket-buyers as surely as it turns away performers.

Representation on the decks lasts a night; an accessible venue lasts every night after.

For a venue operator, the maths is less abstract than it sounds. Retrofitting access – a ramp, a reachable booth, a clear path through the room – is a fixed cost paid once, against an audience widened every night thereafter. A show that arrives with its own travel-and-accommodation packages also does part of the promoter's work, pulling a crowd that a one-off local night could not. Inclusion, framed this way, reads less as obligation than as an underused route to fuller rooms.

The line-up is the visible move. The lasting one is whether Botswana's venues take the cue and build access into the room rather than around the act – the difference between a single inclusive night and an inclusive nightlife.

Sources: allAfrica