Digital marketing and PR professional, travel and food blogger, content creator, freelance writer, travel consultant, and in a past life, chemical engineer. Not to mention being heavily involved in a grassroots organisation, Black Women for Black Lives, which offered practical help and support to international students fleeing Ukraine as the war erupted in 2022. It’s fair to say Joyce Oladeinde has her finger in that many pies, she could open a pie shop.

She admits her career path is “unconventional”, particularly for a British Nigerian woman, with the weight of cultural expectation heavy on her shoulders. But this neuro-divergent, ADHD-diagnosed problem solver says one of her strengths is connecting with people, and that’s how she found herself on a travel path, concentrating her efforts in Africa and the Diaspora.

Curious and determined, she says her natural ability to find solutions led her first to engineering: “I wanted to challenge the fact there are hardly any women engineers,” she says, and volunteered her time while at Teesside University as an ambassador for STEM projects encouraging children into engineering. 

After graduating with a degree in chemical engineering, in 2017 Joyce secured at job at Cummins, which supplies generators to healthcare and industry.  But two years later, she quit the company, realising she wasn’t finding fulfilment in engineering. In the meantime, her blogging sideline, DIY with Joy – which began as a food blog in 2016 – was gaining momentum, as she embraced her passions of solo travel and culinary experiences, and this helped her to transition into marketing. “The content I was showcasing in my videos felt like marketing for destinations,” she says.

Working as a freelance marketing consultant in 2020 as the pandemic hit, she had the freedom to be reactive when she recognised depression taking hold as the world turned on its axis: “I knew I needed to change my environment and get out of the UK where everything was closed,” she says. One of the few countries open at the time was Tanzania, and that’s where she headed. “Many Europeans and travellers flocked there. I felt so caged in the UK but in Tanzania you could hug people, and as humans we need that connection,” she explains. “Although I had no contacts in the country when I arrived, by the time I left six months later, I had a whole new community of friends.”

Joyce spent most of 2021 abroad. Her stay in Tanzania was followed by two months in Kenya and a month in Nigeria. “I started to realise that these destinations have so much to offer,” she says. “That Africa is more than safari and adventure.”

As Covid retreated, she continued honing her marketing experience with a digital marketing role at Abta, that ranged from crisis communications during Greece’s wildfires in 2023 to supporting a Foreign Office campaign, aimed at helping Brits travel safely.

Reaching a crescendo

However, Joyce couldn’t shake her desire for a less corporate life, and so together with her business partner, Ziada Abeid, who she had met in Tanzania, they ramped up the agency they had founded, Crescendo Digital: “We had shared passions and a desire to disrupt the industry.” 

The integrated marketing and PR agency has the aim of amplifying African tourism businesses, not just to international markets, but also within intra-African markets “because Africans are not travelling enough within Africa”.

One of their clients is Africans Rising, a pan-Africa movement, promoting unity, justice and peace. Crescendo Digital helped with its Borderless Africa campaign, advocating for visa-free travel within Africa. “We want free movement for Africans, like in the EU,” Joyce says. “It would mean more trade between nations and it would make it easier for the Diaspora – second and third-generation Africans – to come to the continent and explore their heritage.”

In the UK, Crescendo Digital has promoted the annual London African Food Week, generating excitement for the event through social media and content marketing and securing media coverage.

 
“Our goal is to amplify under-represented voices and elevate African travel experiences,” says Joyce. ‘It’s exciting to be changing the narrative for an emerging market. How many people know that you can go skiing in Morocco, that Senegal has one of the world’s best coasts for surfing, or that Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire produce 70% of the world’s cocoa? There are 54 countries to explore in Africa, but we love to clump them together.”

She’s jumped on opportunities to communicate this, from delivering presentations at both ILTM Africa and WTM Africa in Cape Town earlier this year to nominating herself for TTG’s own 30 Under 30 programme. And just this week, she triumphed at the TravMedia Awards, taking home PR Rising Star of the Year.

Joyce’s career might be unconventional, but it’s been successful, and testament to her belief: “You can reinvent your life at any stage. Don’t put yourself in a box, it’s ok to pivot and follow your dreams.”