AfricaPress-Tanzania: THE tourism industry is one of the hardest-hit by the outbreak of Covid-19 as lockdowns have brought the sector to a standstill.
Last month, the UN’s World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) estimated that the pandemic, which has already claimed more than 200,000 victims globally, would result in the global international tourist arrivals declining by between 20-30 per cent this year.
The decline, according to the international tourism body, would then translate into a loss of between 30-50bn US dollars in spending by international visitors.
Tanzania, one of Africa’s wild-life rich nations has also been severely hit by the disease as about a third of the global population is on Coronavirus lockdown.
The latest Bank of Tanzania (BoT) Monthly Economic Review of January 2020 indicates that in the year ending December 2019, travel proceeds, mostly from tourism-related activities, grew by 3.2 per cent to 2,526m US dollars.
The growth was much associated with an increase in the number of tourists arrivals. Tourism revenues accounted for 61 per cent of all service receipts, which increased to USD 4,139.5 million in 2019 from USD 4,014.7 million in 2018.
As UNWTO warned on the negative impacts the industry would face amid the Coronavirus outbreak, various authorities overseeing wildlife and other tourist attractions ought to come up with alternatives that would help mitigate the effects.
Recently, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority devised a means to rejoin their over 700,000 annual tourists via webcam, an initiative which is not only worth praising but also deserved to be emulated by other organisations.
The initiative is also meant to reach out to prospective tourists around the world that will be able to see what is happening at Ngorongoro Crater, Ndutu, Olduvai Gorge, and seven other selected points within the conserved area -the crater being the largest unflooded and unbroken caldera in the world.
This comes as the country experiences a record low number of tourists, with Ngorongoro registering three tourists in one of the few days ago and zero in another.
The place is unusually quiet. The initiative of the Webcam will, among other things, reunite Ngorongoro with their familiar tourists while they are under lockdown but also connect the Authority with many other potential tourists in different continents.
As we commend the authority for coming up with this shrewd idea we also call upon other authorities like Tanzania National Parks (Tanapa) to think outside the box and come up with measures that in any way that is possible would help in mitigating the effects of the deadly virus.
