EDITORIAL: TOURISM RECOVERY POINTS TO BETTER TIMES AHEAD
The general consensus is that Tanzanian tourism is recovering after the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on national and world economies in less than two years since it broke out in December 2019. In the event, tourist source markets abroad imposed lockdowns and other stringent travel restrictions on their people, thereby drastically limiting foreign travel.
Largely as a consequence thereof, the numbers of tourist arrivals in Tanzania (for instance) steeply fell on the back of the ravaging pandemic – and the country’s tourism earnings plunged, dropping from $2.6 billion in 2019 to a relatively measly $1 billion in 2020.
But, although the mutating coronavirus is not quite finished – and is still playing merry hell with the world – we nonetheless have already seen early signs of recovery by the tourism business in Tanzania.
As we reported in our yesterday’s edition, the central Bank of Tanzania said in its second Quarterly Economic Bulletin this year that the country’s tourism services “accounted for a surplus of $250.2 million in (the Quarter to) June 2021: a significant increase from the surplus of $81.1 million recorded in the same quarter” last year.
On September 14, we cited the East African Community Secretariat as saying that, while foreign tourist arrivals in the EAC states reached a record 6.9 million in 2019 – before the Covid-19 surfaced in the region – that number dropped to 2.25 million in 2020.
But all signs are that the numbers will rise to 3.75 million tourists this year – and, bar events of cataclysmic proportions, the tourism business is firmly on a recovery trajectory.
Generally, travel and tourism is among the world’s leading economic sectors. It contributed about 10.4 percent of the global GDP in 2019, and 6-7 percent of total employment – with an estimated 1.5 billion international tourist arrivals worldwide.
Reports of its recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic are, therefore, most welcome indeed.
LET’S BOOST LEATHER INDUSTRY
Despite being home to the third largest livestock population in Africa behind Ethiopia and Sudan, Tanzania’s leather industry is still far from realising its full potential.
Tanzania is estimated to have more than 30 million head of cattle. This alone is enough to make it the largest producer of leather goods – including footwear, handbags, belts, jackets and wallets – in the region instead of importing them.
The country produces an estimated four million pieces of hides and skins annually, most of which end up in dump-sites for lack of functional value-addition facilities. According to the Livestock Production and Marketing Directorate of the Livestock and Fisheries ministry, in the 2018/19 financial year Tanzania produced 11.2 million pieces of leather, most of which were exported raw.
Currently, Tanzania has 150 small manufacturers of leather goods, which, however, are unable to satisfy domestic demand.
The country’s annual demand for footwear, for example, is estimated at 54 million pairs, but only 1.7 million pairs are produced by local manufacturers.
There is a need to facilitate investment in leather value addition sooner than later.
