BREAKFAST NEWS: November 5, 2014 TOURISM MASTERPLAN CRITICISED “There is a disconnection between the master plan, the ideas in [it] and what is on the ground and what is possible to do in Uganda right now,” says Kelley MacTavish Mungar the executive director of Pearl of Africa Tours and Travels Ltd. The master plan, according to Mungar, was put together by people who know very little about Uganda’s tourism sector. “People who put it together did not talk to the private sector extensively… they bring a consultant from outside the country, he comes and talks to ten people for ten minutes and he runs away and he thinks he is an expert,” Mungar notes. The United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) team, led by Roger Goodacre and Dr Harsh Varma, using financial support from government, UNWTO and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), formulated the master plan. Herbert Byaruhanga, the president of the Uganda Tourism Association, agrees with Mungar. He says the 300-page document is “too wide and does not concentrate on specific issues.” “It mentions regional tourism clusters, but they don’t tell us how they are going to be managed,” he says, and adds: “These clusters are politically motivated and once those [politicians] lose their seats, the clusters will crumble.” This is what you reap when you choose not to engage stakeholders in your planning. The master plan doesn’t show us how government plans to position the country,” says Baluku Geoffrey of Trek East Africa safaris. observer.ug/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=34743:-critics-punch-holes-in-tourism-master-plan&catid=38:business&Itemid=68 #End
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 07:19:23 +0000
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