adminOfficially opening the 47th Retosa board meeting in Bulawayo on Wednesday evening, Eng Mzembi bemoaned the continent’s proportion of the global market share.
“I believe Retosa should aim at transforming itself into a regional tourism think-tank, partly responsible for co-ordinating regionally integrated products and also for systematic rationalisation of tourism targets in the region.
“We need, as a region, to do everything possible to raise Africa’s proportion of the global tourism Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) from the current four percent to at least 10 percent within the next five years to 2016,” he said.
The World Travel and Tourism Council has projected that tourism will contribute about $6 trillion to the global economy, or nine percent of global GDP this year.
The sector supports 260 million jobs and according to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, international arrivals for 2010 were at 940 million.
“These are very encouraging figures indeed, but what is disheartening about the tourism statistics is that the whole continent of Africa gets only four percent of the global market share. Zimbabwe in turn gets two percent of Africa’s market share,” he said.
He said Africa’s share of the global revenue was too tiny and this was more so when it was looked at against the background of massive diverse natural and cultural resources the continent has.
He said the increase of tourism global revenue to $6 trillion was on the back of a rise in living standards fuelled by growing wealth in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, also known as BRICS.
“I believe a smartly worked out Southern African strategy, aligned to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals of 2015, targeted at both our traditional source markets, as well as at the BRICS countries, would take us a long way towards the achievement of the goal of 10 percent of global receipts by 2016,” he said.
In trying to capture the BRICS countries, he said it would be necessary for the region to have a paradigm shift of the major qualities of the regional tourism product; away from the basically euro-centric product towards a more balanced product capable of exciting the BRICS.
He said the potential that tourism holds for Africa should be made clear to African governments with Retosa helping each member state to convey in facts and figures, the difference that increased investment into, and increased facilitating for, tourism could make to respective national economies.
Eng Mzembi said the extraordinary Tourism Ministers’ Summit to be held in Mauritius in the first quarter of next year should serve as the starting point for the elevation of tourism issues to higher levels of governments.
“I sincerely hope the Sadc Secretariat will have an active presence at the Mauritius Tourism Ministers’ Summit and help us raise the level of discourse and stir the debate in the right direction,” said Eng Mzembi.-The Chronicle
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