Africa-Press – Uganda. The government through the Directorate of Industrial Training (DIT) has set assessment standards that tourist guides must meet before the economy fully reopens next month.
According to Ms Ruth Mukyala, the acting director of DIT, the directorate—with funding from the Belgium Agency, Enabel, developed the training manuals that all institutions training tour guides must follow to ensure they meet required skills.
Upon completion of study at respective training institutions, the DIT will assess the tour guides’ competencies before certifying them.
Ms Mukyala says the developed guidelines are slated to bridge the gap between the training and the assessment of skills since most of the trainees graduate with knowledge, but they do not possess the required skills and competence.
Consequently, all tour guides will be expected to know the best hotels in the country and tourism sites. They are also expected to exhibit better communication skills and should be versatile in local languages to help tourists in translations.
Other skills include maintaining a good personal relationship with tourists, having a good attitude towards work, and being able to recommend proper transport services to the tourists.
Uganda is home to a wide range of tourism resources and is ranked as a top tourist destination and one of only three countries with about 50 percent of the world’s known population of endangered mountain gorillas
In the Financial Year, 2018/2019 tourism earned Uganda’s Gross Domestic Product Shs5.6 trillion ($1.60 billion as of December 2019) from 1.6 million tourists (World Bank 2019), making it one of Uganda’s biggest revenue earners. The industry created 536,600 jobs in 2019 and 321,960 jobs in 2020 among these tour guides, an essential part of the industry.
This move to set assessment standards is welcome and long overdue.
A tour guide without accurate and significant knowledge is bound to cost the country a couple of returning or even new tourists. A guide, who does not provide a tourist with an engaging experience, will cost the government millions of shillings and tourists. There are thousands of tour guides spread across the country.
However, according to Uganda Tourism Board, most of them lack the necessary ethics and skills while practising their job, which affects the growth of the tourism industry.
Stories have been told of tourists, local and international who have been duped by unscrupulous operators or taken around in circles by guides who do not know answers to some basic questions.
This assessment, if done in good faith, will weed these out and help the industry come out of the pandemic stronger.
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