Zim projects US$750m tourism boost

BRIAN SITHOLE

Tourism Minister Mangaliso Ndlovu says the industry is projecting growth of at least US$750m this year and will capitalise on Zimbabwe’s hosting of global meetings.

Ndlovu told Business Times that the country had taken a knock in the last years due to Covid-19 and other issues but the situation has now significantly improved.

“We had reached a US$1.5bn mark in tourism in 2018 going to 2019. Covid-19 took us back many years. We are slowly moving forward now because from 2020, our tourism gave us something in the range of US$250m, 2021, just below US$400m, this time I think we might even do more than US$750m,” Ndlovu said.

“We had hoped that it would be much faster. We are happy we are doing better than what the UNWTO had projected, but we are still not doing better than we had projected for ourselves,” he added.

The Minister said they were hoping to maintain the momentum and capitalise on the country’s hosting of the International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa (ICASA) and an Information

Communication Technology (ICT) conference later this year.

“All these are bringing between 500 and 1500 people at a time. We hope these will boost our tourism in a big way,” he said.

Ndlovu said the Ministry has now established a revolving fund for the sector which was now before the Ministry of Finance.

“We, for the first time, have been able to establish a revolving fund for the sector. We are still polishing it up with the Ministry of Finance.

We hope that access to more capital will help us in terms of the small to medium scale enterprises within the sector to get money to spruce up their places so that they can compete with others locally and also within the region.”