Zinzia Adhiambo

Zinzia Adhiambo is a Kenyan travel entrepreneur who turned a personal love of exploring into a business built around experiences that feel both meaningful and affordable. She started Travelvia Friends & Explorers with a clear motivation: to support her family and build a more secure future, using her enthusiasm for discovery as the engine for a sustainable income.

Travelvia is a licensed travel and destination management company. It handles local and international bookings, designs tailor-made tours and safaris, assembles holiday packages, and arranges hotel stays, car hire and logistics for groups. What sets it apart is a line of tours inside informal settlements, designed to build cultural understanding between visitors and residents and to steer tourism toward community-driven development. Rather than treating these neighbourhoods as a backdrop, the model aims to link guests with local people in ways that leave a positive mark on both sides.

In 2025 Zinzia was selected, at the age of 21, as a fellow of the Anzisha Prize, a pan-African programme for entrepreneurs aged 15 to 22, joining a cohort of roughly 40 young founders from across the continent. The recognition places her among a new generation of African business builders who are proving that hospitality can be inclusive, rooted in community and still commercially sound. Her story shows how a young founder can take a passion, formalise it into a licensed enterprise and use it to open doors for the people and places around her.