Tourism revolving fund in the offing

“This quarter has seen the tabling of a concrete financially backed proposal to establish the revolving fund.
“It follows Government’s recognition of the need to re-tool, re-kit and add new services for growth of the tourism sector,” he said.

Minister Mzembi said the fund would revive the industry from the decade old decline and ensure it played a significant role in the economy.
“It is very necessary to arrest the general state of decline in standard and quality of tourism facilities and services,” he said.

He said various programmes were in place to ensure the tourism sector emerged top in the region and the world at large.
The Ministry, Minister Mzembi said, was working on concluding the National Tourism Policy and the Tourism Master Plan that would guide the development of tourism, and address specific issues and challenges the sector was facing.

With budgetary support, Minister Mzembi said tourism would emerge as the best performing sector in the economy.
“In the absence of solid financial back-up we have witnessed how we can get widely varying figures when it comes to tourism arrivals.
“It gets even more complicated when we try to state tourism receipts or revenue,” he said.

He said the current positive performance was being achieved through the sector’s own means and programmes.
Meanwhile Minister Mzembi said for national tourism to thrive its policies should be based on sound research and policy formulation.
“We have come to understand that tourism depends on a number of tourism enablers which include peace and stability, destination accessibility and well developed and networked ICT among many others,” he said.

Negative publicity by the Western media negatively affected the tourism sector over the past decade but the sector has remained among the leading foreign currency earners.

The sector has however, begun to gain international recognition as evidenced by the country winning the bid to co-host the United Nations World Tourism Organisation general assembly with Zambia in 2013. — New Ziana.