Groups see tourism as tool to help African nations

LUANDA, Angola – Three years after the end of civil war, Angola is trying to lure foreign tourists to this country where decades of fierce fighting littered the countryside with land mines, left much of it in ruins and decimated the exotic wildlife once abundant in lush national parks.

At least six new four- and five-star hotels are planned on land confiscated by the government and nestled between the Mediterranean-style colonnades, arches, and faded pastels of its old colonial architecture and the miles of squalid slums that stretch to the horizon in this seaside capital.

Tourism is the world’s largest industry and every year it pumps billions of dollars into some of the poorest countries in the world. It creates jobs, builds new roads, airports, hotels and hospitals.

“Of the 49 least developed countries, 46 of them now have tourism as the largest foreign exchange earner,” said Louis D’Amore, president and founder of the Vermont-based International Institute for Peace Through Tourism.

Africa is the world’s poorest continent and, despite billions of dollars in aid, falls farther behind the rest of the world every year.

Last year Kenya, with one of Africa’s most developed tourism industries, hosted about 600,000 tourists and pocketed $577 million – or about 12 percent of its gross domestic product.

“When tourism is thriving, we get better schools, better hospitals and better infrastructure. When tourism does well, so do our other industries,” said Kenya tourism ministry official Rebecca Nabutola.

Some critics charge that in the rush to collect tourist dollars, indigenous cultures are changed forever or forced to move away from ancestral lands to make way for new hotels, restaurants, roads or airports.

Akaki Ayumu Jovino, Uganda’s minister of tourism and antiquities, deflects the criticisms with a soft laugh and a smile.

“With proper planning, the people will not be exploited,” Jovino said. “In Uganda, 20 percent of all gate receipts go directly to local communities to spend on projects as they see fit.”

Last year, he said, Uganda hosted 512,000 tourists – up from almost zero in the 1970s and early ‘80s, when the brutal rule of dictator Idi Amin Dada frightened away all but the hardiest.

The International Council of Tourism Partners has launched a “Mission Africa” initiative to triple tourism income on the continent by 2015.

“If managed carefully, tourism can make a huge contribution to the regeneration of the African continent,” said Bene Maleka, an official with the Southern African Development Bank.

Marlene Melton, president of African Ventures, a New York-based company that helps African countries promote tourism in America, said travel to the continent is hurt by the perception of it as a poor and dangerous place always caught up in wars, coups and famine.

“If there is a war in Sierra Leone, people think they can’t go anywhere in Africa,” said Melton. “When there was a war in Sarajevo people were still going to France, Spain and elsewhere in Europe because those countries advertised.”

Good media campaigns would help, Uganda’s Jovino said, but they are simply too expensive.

“The challenge for Africa is not to sit back and lament,” he said. “We wanted to give a new visibility to tourism in Africa and we are succeeding.”