Digital Nomads: Alma Asinobi learned to build mobility by confronting her own immobility

Alma Asinobi remembered the moment reality set in. The profession she had prepared for would not fund the life she wanted to live. 

It was late 2020, and she had just finished her master’s degree in architecture from Covenant University, Ota, in Southwestern Nigeria. Asinobi did the math: if she stayed in the profession and stretched a Nigerian junior architect’s salary, she would not be able to travel the way she wanted.

According to Glassdoor data from July 2022, junior architects in Lagos earned between ₦124,000 and ₦208,000 ($299–$502 at the official exchange rate at the time) monthly, underscoring the modest pay many early-career professionals in Nigeria’s architecture industry received.

But before this awakening, Asinobi had been quietly building other skills. She managed a blog, ran a small thrift business and learned how communities formed around social media. She applied for a content writing role at an investment management startup, Cowrywise, in late 2020. 

Although she didn’t get the job, her writing caught the attention of a human resources manager who found her Instagram profile and later offered her a content marketing strategist role.

“My entire career in tech started not because I studied anything in marketing,” she said. “It was just me putting out these skills I already had.”

She built a community on the Cowrywise app around savings and took on consulting work. By the time she decided to leave the role, she had assembled what she calls six streams of income, and none of it came from the degree she had spent years pursuing.

The first trip beyond the Nigerian border

But the real shift that would define her next five years came in 2020, on a weekend road trip to  Benin Republic that she said cost her ₦45,500 ($121.62, using the exchange rate as of March 2020). It was an escape with two friends, and only a few days before the COVID-19 pandemic locked the world down. 

“We got a taxi, took a drive to the border, and then we stayed in  Benin Republic for the weekend,” she said. 

Asinobi documented all the trip entailed, and pulled it all together into an ebook and put it up for pre-order while she was still travelling. By the time she returned to Lagos, the pre-order sales had exceeded what she had spent on the entire trip.

“I realised that there was a gap,” she said. “Many people wanted the information, but not enough people were sharing it.”

During the lockdown, when travel was not possible, she shared what she was learning about the creator economy. 

When the world reopened, she travelled to Senegal in November 2021, deliberately flooding her feeds with content, so that she would not be known merely as someone who travelled occasionally, but as someone for whom travel was central. 

Asinobi shared, “During that period, I started to post a lot more about my trips and everything, and I knew that I was coming closer and closer to the end of my time in the nine-to-five.”

By January 2022, she said she had to quit her fintech job to pursue content creation full-time. 

In August that same year, she received an offer to resume a role as an associate in content & performance marketing from a Nairobi and Berlin-based company, Kwara, a startup turning credit unions into modern digital banks. The role allowed her to temporarily move to Nairobi, Kenya, which she did through an East African Visa by October of the same year.

Months later, Asinobi, in pursuit of another stream of income to fund her travel lifestyle, said she realised she wanted to build a travel company. At this point, she was also planning one-off trips for people, ranging from honeymoons to getaways, while providing information on visa applications, and also growing her personal brand as a travel content creator. 

Earnings in foreign currency from her role at Kwara also allowed her to save and build her travel fund without the fluctuations common to the Naira.

In December 2022, she returned to Nigeria and realised that the demand for travel information from her travel community was overwhelming. People were reaching out to ask for help with visas and inquiring about how to navigate travel systems. 

The same month, she launched  Kaijego, her travel business, after realising that she could not help people at scale without structure. The name “Kaijego” is linked to Asinobi’s Igbo roots, a tribe in Southeastern Nigeria; combining “Ka anyi je” (let’s go) with “Anyi e je go” (we have gone).

Kaijego solves a specific problem: Africans want to travel. But they are immobilised by the fear of going alone, fear of visa rejection, fear of the sheer machinery of planning in a system that was not built for them. Kaijego removes part of that friction. It provides companions, a route, and proof that the journey is possible.

In March 2023, Kaijego had its first group trip to Beirut, Lebanon. And Asinobi learned something: the trip itself is not the endpoint. 

“When people travel with us for the first time, they realise there’s more,” she said. “There’s more to see, more to do, more of the world they want to see. And within a few trips, they’re already considering moving abroad, and building different lives.”

Travel, she also discovered, is about perspective. It is about knowing what 24-hour electricity feels like, what a road without potholes looks like, and what becomes possible when you see it with your own eyes instead of imagining it from home. “When they come back home with that perspective, they know what exists,” she said. “They can demand more.”

She sees the gaps that keep Africans grounded: the opaque and capricious visa systems, the currency conversions that make travel prohibitively expensive, the ecosystem of visa agents charging different prices for the same service, and the lack of transparency about why applications are denied. 

African travellers paid a steep price for Europe’s visa barriers in 2024. According to Semafor, applicants from countries including Comoros, Senegal, Nigeria, and Ghana faced some of the highest Schengen rejection rates globally, losing an estimated $68 million in non-refundable application fees.

And she is beginning to work on solutions that operate at that level, primarily through travel education.

“We’re actively trying to build for the [travel] space,” Asinobi said. “People don’t really know how things work, usually, when countries give you a visa refusal. They give you a generic paper that everybody gets, so you don’t know whether it’s because of your bank statements or because you don’t have strong ties to your country or because of your work history.”

Getting around continents, countries and cities

“I try to go to places where I probably already have an idea of most languages,” Asinobi shared. “I might not be able to speak, but I understand a bit of what people are saying. [I speak] French, particularly Spanish and Arabic, just a tiny little bit.” 

For apps, Asinobi revealed that her go-tos range from the basic Google Maps, which she downloads offline—in case of network downtimes—and Airalo for e-Sims, to stay connected when she’s travelling.

For cheap flight alerts, she leverages FARE, a web app for cheap flight notifications. “Sometimes I see a cheap flight notification, and then I decide to go to the country, because there’s an affordable flight,” she said. 

However, Asinobi is clear. For travellers, she advises getting their finances in order first.

The financial strategy is not complicated. 

“If you earn less than ₦500,000 ($366.93)* a month, focus on increasing your income before you focus on travelling,” she said, “Build a dedicated travel fund, even if it is only ₦20,000 ($14.68)* to ₦100,000 ($73.39)* a month. Within a few months, you can visit nearby countries, the Benin Republic, Togo, and Ghana, and build a travel history. Immigration officers want to see that you can leave your country and return. That you are trustworthy.”

For her, her diversified income stream was built layer after layer over the years: her tech background, work with international brands, and consulting that serves global audiences that come in dollars or other stable currencies.

The multiplier effect is what has made constant travel possible. “You might need to take some risks,” she added, “But you don’t have to quit your job today. You can learn on the side until you are ready to leap.”

Four years after she had aspired to start her travel company, Asinobi is building infrastructure for African mobility. And she is systematically teaching others that the question is not, ‘how do I afford to travel?’ but rather ‘what am I willing to change to make travel possible?’

The answer, she has shown, is the willingness to walk away from a path that was never going to take you where you wanted to go, and the discipline to build something better in its place.

The exchange rate is $1 to ₦1,362.64 as of June 20, 2026