While organisations marked the day with statements, Incel Tourism sent its people into schools.
On the Friday before International Women’s Day 2026, a team from Lagos travel and destination management company Incel Tourism walked into Kembos College in Isolo with a simple brief: talk to young women about what the world looks like when you decide to engage it on your own terms.
About 40 senior secondary school girls attended the session, which covered leadership, personal ambition, and the practical value of global exposure.
A second visit followed the Monday after, at Maryland Comprehensive High School, completing a two-school outreach under the company’s Give to Gain initiative — a programme designed to take industry professionals directly into classrooms rather than keep community engagement at the level of press releases and pledges.
Uche Maduka, a senior executive at Incel Tourism who facilitated the Kembos session, framed the afternoon around the idea that generosity extends well beyond money.
“When we give our voices, our support, our resources, and our ideas, we create impact far beyond ourselves. Our actions inspire others to believe that extraordinary things are possible.”
The Kembos visit carried an additional moment worth noting. Ifewemeh-Ojo Hadassah Ohihioemehen, a student at the school, had recently placed third in the Senior Category of the 6th Annual SystemSpecs Children’s Day Essay Competition; a national contest drawing entries from across Nigeria.
The Incel Tourism team formally recognised her achievement during the session, turning what might have been a routine motivational visit into something more grounded: a celebration of excellence that was already present in the room, before any speaker arrived.
At Maryland Comprehensive High School, conversations centred on confidence and the specific courage required to imagine yourself in environments you have not yet entered. Students left with travel care packages — a deliberate, physical gesture reinforcing that the world beyond Lagos is not an abstraction but a genuine destination.
School management at both institutions welcomed the visits. For many students, the sessions offered a first direct encounter with working professionals in the travel and hospitality sector — an industry that remains one of the more significant drivers of intra-African economic activity, and one that is rarely represented in secondary school career conversations.
Nigeria’s gender participation gap in formal professional sectors is well-documented. Less discussed is the earlier, quieter gap: the one that forms before a young woman ever applies for a job, in the moment she decides whether a given professional world is one she is allowed to want.
Initiatives like Give to Gain work at precisely that level.
International Women’s Day produces no shortage of corporate goodwill. What Incel Tourism offered instead, across two school halls in mainland Lagos, was something harder to manufacture: time, presence, and the particular message that comes from professionals who show up in person.
