Enkiama did not begin as a business. It began as something I could not stop noticing.
It started, as these things do, with a question I kept being asked. Friends and families abroad would write to me: we want to see Tanzania — who should we travel with? I would recommend someone. And too often, what came back was disappointment. Not disaster, usually. Just a gap between what people had hoped for and what they were given. I watched it happen to people I cared about, again and again, for years.
That is where the idea began, around 2015. It took a decade of watching, learning, and refusing to accept that this was simply how it worked before Enkiama itself was founded in October 2025 — built on a single principle carried over from those years: treat every traveller the way you would want your own friend to be treated.
It began, honestly, with a close circle — people we already knew. It is growing now, and strangers write to us who will become friends. What has not changed, and will not, is that everyone receives the same care and the same professionalism. The standard was set by looking after people we loved. We were never going to lower it for anyone else.
I grew up within Tanzanian society, and I have also spent a good deal of my life among the international community. Standing in both places, I kept seeing the same thing from two sides. A purely international company arrives and, however well-meaning, misses the local context entirely. A local company — even an experienced one — often misses what an international traveller genuinely needs. Between the two sits a gap, and a rigidity, that no one seemed in a hurry to close.
There was something else I could not unsee. I know a great many people who studied tourism — talented, passionate people — who could not find a place in the industry they had trained for, simply because the opportunities were too few. It seemed wrong that a country so rich in what travellers come for should have so little room for its own.
I do not believe tourism should be only about the transaction. The transaction is where most companies stop. I wanted to build the thing that begins there.
So Enkiama is my attempt to stand in that gap: to bring international care and local truth into the same room, and to make room for the Tanzanians who should have been in it all along. If we are proud of one thing, it is that — the ability to read both contexts at once, and to let neither one be the thing that gets lost. It is why we name our people and pay them properly. It is why we place travellers inside the society rather than beside it. It is why we would rather have an honest conversation than close a sale.
I should be honest about myself, too. I am a biomedical engineer and computer scientist by training — I did not come to this from inside the travel industry, chasing its margins. I came to it because the values mattered more than the market. That outsider’s eye is, I think, part of what lets Enkiama do things differently.
And I want to be clear that Enkiama is not me. It is our local team, a growing international one, the guests who have travelled with us, and the friends who believed in it early. I am only a part of it now — which is exactly as it should be. My hope is simply to keep fighting for these values while staying open to change: the kind of change that is genuinely impactful, and that outlives the goal it started from.
For now, I am also the person you reach. Based in Spain, I read every message myself — in English or Spanish — and reply personally. When you write to Enkiama, you are writing to me. If any of this resonates, I would like to hear from you.
Baraka
Founder, Enkiama · based in Spain