Tanzania to diversify tourism product range

By Zephania Ubwani l Business Daily/etn
Concerned with its national parks, Tanzania is mulling over reverting to community-based tourism.
Tanzanian authorities are considering reverting to community-based tourism (CBT) to ease pressure on national parks.

Experts are convinced that diversification of the tourism product range is what will save the nation's parks from imminent destruction through over-exploitation.

A recent report by Sand County Foundation – a community-based conservation group – says diversifying into the country's vast cultural and ecotourism products could ease pressure on game parks and ensure long term environmental sustainability.

Though proponents of the plan claim to have their eyes strictly on dangers to the environment of the neck-break growth in game tourism, observers were quick to point out that all Tanzania is doing is playing the catch up game following in the footsteps of South Africa and more recently Kenya's drive to limit their exposure to game tourism.

In pushing for diversification, the Sand County Foundation report cites the Tarangire National Park where the number of visitors have increased from 7,290 in 1987/88 to 54,454 in 1996/97.

"With more people using limited space, the quality of experience for many tourists drops, especially for high-end foreign tourists from the United States and Europe," the report says.

Tanzania's annual earnings from tourism have risen to $725 million last year from $65 million in 1990 having grown at an average annual rate of 10 per cent over a decade. Most of this growth came from visitors to protected areas in the country's northern circuit. Environmentalists contend that to ease the pressure on the circuit, there is need to market locally-controlled and managed ecotourism activities.

Besides environmental concerns, cultural and ecotourism are seen to be the best avenues through which the benefits of tourism can trickle down to the majority of rural-based Tanzanians.

Villages cited to have benefited from the venture included Ololosokwan in Ngorongoro district. It now earns $55,000 annually from several ecotourism joint ventures.

Another village, Sinya, in Monduli district, has a contract which guarantees it a minimum of $30,000 per year for use of its land by a tourism company, and Loiborsoiut in Simanjiro district, which earned $43,000 from a similar joint venture between 1994 and 1998.

Longido district has also benefited from a cultural tourism program, which has increased the number of tourists from 25 in 1995 to 600 in 2000, with the village earning over $11,000 in fees paid by visiting companies and individual tourists.

"The increase in CBT in northern Tanzania that has occurred over the past five years holds critical opportunities in a variety of contexts. If CBT's development is supported and promoted, community-based private sector ventures can produce synergy among Tanzania's macro-economic growth, rural livelihood diversification and wildlife conservation," the report said.

The Sand County Foundation report warns that though Tanzania still has expansive areas of wildlife attractions, pressure in the national parks could threaten ecological sustainability in the long term.

Environmental concerns have already seen Ngorongoro conservation area impose restrictions on the number of vehicles going to the crater to slow down destruction of the fragile eco-system.

A number of national parks have instituted similar measures in specific areas to reduce the number of visitors, vehicles and man-made structures.

June 26, 2007   Posted in: Africa