AfricaPress-Tanzania: GLOBAL Education Link (GEL) has sent 3,000 secondary and university students to various tourist attractions in the last three years.
GEL, an agency which connects students to overseas universities, on Thursday sent the students to various tourism and historical sites focusing on cultivating a culture of domestic tourism.
The idea is also geared towards boosting revenue to the nation.
GEL Director Abdulmalik Mollel said when speaking to students who expected to travel abroad for their studies under the agency, who also had visited various historical sites for practical learning, that the country should plan the seeds of internal tourists.
“We have many tourist attractions and historical sites where many Tanzanians are not familiar with. That’s why we (GEL) drumbeat local tourism, which is a good source of income generation,” Mr Mollel said.
He said if Tanzanians were sensitised to visit the sites, the nation would collect billions of shillings and increase the national income.
“If we get only 10 million Tanzanians who visit tourist and historical sites we will get billions of shillings. We must teach our people that instead of visiting beaches every holidays there are other attractive areas they can visit and enjoy their holidays,” he said.
Mollel said for many years, GEL had been striving to inculcate that culture in the youth by organising educational tourism trips before starting their overseas studies.
He said education tourism aimed fostering a career nesting and nurturing encounter especially with students in lower and higher learning institutions by exposing them to various professional areas where they could get opportunities to meet and discuss with professionals from similar or different disciplines.
In this way, students get broad perspectives in pursuing their careers in diverse fields of business, arts, engineering, health and allied sciences.
