By Albert Baron Ansu
Traveling from place to place has now been eased with the flattening of the COVID-19 curves around the world. For African countries especially, with the much emphasis on building resilience for recovery and projections of growth, one area that represents low hanging fruit for plucking is the hospitality sector, hotels and attractive scenic scenes.
As we are forward looking, we can look back at the scale of the impact of COVID-19 on the sector as reported by the World Trade Organization.
“According to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), globally there was a fall of 22% in international tourist arrivals during the first quarter of 2020. It predicts an annual decline of between 60% and 80% in international tourist arrivals across 2020 when compared with 2019…”
Now things are improving, A-Z Africa Magazine subscribes to the assumption that the hospitality sector can be a potent source of making money in augmenting revenues for the mammoth challenges in making up for the COVID 19 socio-economic deficit and deficienciences in African states.
You cannot talk about the hospitality sector without talking about airlines and other forms of transportation via road and sea. It is reassuring that airlines are now criss-crossing the airspace from the west to Africa. Airports that have been dormant are warming up to the positive sign of flight resumption without compromising security in screening for COVID inbound and outbound travellers.
The argument is that a vibrant hospitality sector for travelers coming in for business and leisure must have an accompaniment of other critical factors in good road networks, food, beverages, arts and crafts, safety policies and accouterment.
Oliver Garnet is Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer for Kassada Capitall Management whose incisive article: Why Africa’s Hospitality Sector is Key to The Continent’s Economic Recovery Post COVID-19 provides a valuable insight into the strength of the industry.
It makes the point|: “One of the worst hit industries in Africa is the tourism and hospitality sector, one of the most significant contributors to the continent’s economic and social growth. Prior to Covid-19, the continent attracted 70m tourist arrivals in 2019, generating more than US$38bn. The sector employs about 25 million people across the Continent. Travel and tourism accounts for one in five of all new jobs created worldwide for the last five years. “
No doubt this is an eye opener to appreciate the powerfulness of a sector that is taken for granted in many countries.
Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea have not fully harnessed tourism and when such figures are released, it becomes inspirational. As it were in many infrastructural status of countries there are bound to be variances.
Among the top ten tourist destination countries in Africa we can consider: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya Congo, Uganda, Botswana and Egypt what is unique about them goes beyond the exquisite architectural artefacts. Come to think of it-culture, tradition and natural wonders that have been preserved have come to play pivotal influence in providing the allure for tourists. We must recognize the fact that every country has its peculiarity, grandeur and comparative edge. What might be appealing to one tourist to visit Egypt might be lacking in Kenya. Also evident in the scan of the continental hospitality sector is the skills set variance. It is important to note that there are countries ahead of others in the human resource requirement to fill positions at various levels of the workflow.
However, in this day and age of adaptive development, countries with weak or under-utilized incentives for hospitality must learn from success stories around the world. There is this vogue phrase of sector skills development for tourism and hospitality. Almost all countries in Africa have space for hotel management and tourism and these have to be brought to speed in fitting in the order of post COVID-19 imperative.
A Ghanaian report published in 2020 on the subject matter makes the important points that can be useful for countries in Africa that are aspiring to maximize Gross Domestic Products from the hospitality sector and even create job opportunities for the hordes of jobless youths.
“Career pathways into the tourism and hospitality sector vary. Vacancies for management and supervisory level occupations in formal enterprises are generally filled from technical and traditional universities or in some cases recruited internationally in order to select a candidate with the appropriate experience, particularly in dealing with international visitors.”
We have to also consider that tourism and hospitality are not stand alone entities and must be very much reliant on the supportive role of other actors including energy and power, local food producers and importers, the transporters, the security services, communication, the health sector among others. It is in this regard that policy formulations in the sector must lay emphasis on the interconnectedness of sectors linked to hospitality and tourism.
We are projecting a bright future for hospitality sector with the impetus from the Africa Continental Free Trade Area now headquartered in Accra.
Writing in the Vanguard under the header Hospitality as the key driver of Africa’s Economic Growth, George Ukadike made the point: “THE tourism sector is expected to drive Africa’s economic growth following the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, AfCFTA, through its travel and hospitality subsectors…”
The cited article comes out with progressive statistics that lend credence to the optimism in the air. In 2018, there were 67 million visitors to Africa on business and leisure. This showed a seven per cent increase from 63 million recorded in 2017 and a significant increase from 58 million in 2016.
Following the pattern of incremental pace of the flow of visitors during the referenced periods, it is but safe to hold firm to the conviction that the hospitality and tourism sector are bound to witness a boom. Therefore African states that have been lagging behind must do the spade work to attract tourists by upgrading the systems and human resource base to fit into what is actually a competitive space.