Secretary General of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, UNWTO, Mr Taleb Rifai, says travel and tourism is one of the vehicles that can be used to address the recent recession. He added that the UNWTO has developed a roadmap to recovery that outlines the role of travel and tourism in addressing this challenge.
Mr Rifai was addressing a capacity building workshop aimed at assisting English speaking African countries in developing tools to collate and measure tourism statistics using international standards.
Research has shown that a lot of countries in Africa still use tourism data collecting tools or processes that are not fully compliant with the United Nations World Tourism Organisations (UNWTO) standards. Tourism statistics produced or disseminated by these countries is therefore not comparable with other countries on the continent and globally. This challenge has been attributed to a lack of financial and human resources and the poor emphasis on the importance of tourism data.
The member countries participating in the programme are Botswana, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Seychelles, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
South Africa has been identified as a leader in the area of tourism statistics and was therefore chosen as the regional hub in Africa by the UNWTO with the aim to help capacitate her counter parts. This was evident through the launch of the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) in May this year. This important milestone allows South Africa to collate tourism data that meets international standards and measure its contribution to the economy.
The TSA is an accounting framework adopted by the United Nations (UN) to measure goods and services associated with tourism according to international standards, concepts, classifications and definitions. The TSA provides stakeholders (governments, entrepreneurs and citizens) with reliable data to assist them in the design of public policies and business strategies for tourism and for the evaluation of their efficiency.
The partnership between South Africa and the UNWTO on this initiative began in 2007, through the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding. To date three workshops have been held in the country. In welcoming the delegates to South Africa, Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk says we need to ensure that the information we gather is factual because it can assist policy makers in arriving at decisions.
The development of the TSA in South Africa and the workshops is done in partnership with the Departments of Home Affairs, Trade and Industry, Treasure, Statistics South Africa, South African Tourism, South African Reserve Bank and the UNWTO.
Secretary General will be in the country for two days. Tomorrow he will engage with senior managers in the tourism industry.
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Issued by: Department of Tourism
23 November 2009
