By Jonathan Mbiriyamveka
Environment, Climate, Tourism and Hospitality Industry Deputy Minister Barbra Rwodzi says Tourism Satellite Account is a key instrument meant to improve the measurement of the performance of the Tourism sector.
Officially launching the TSA Thursday, Deputy Minister Rwodzi said Zimbabwe witnessed a decline in tourist arrivals from 2 294 259 in 2019 to 630,369 in 2020 with the advent of Covid-19.
“The negative trend further continued in 2021 as arrivals suffered a further down fall of 40% to 375 799. Now that we have the Zimbabwe TSA in place, there is need to sustain the system through undertaking periodic surveys such as the Visitor Exit Survey and the Domestic and Outbound Tourism Survey to build on this framework that we have put in place,
“Going forward, it is therefore imperative for us to embrace modern technologies in data collection to ensure timeous availability of information to update the Tourism Satellite Account,” she said.
Further, she said, the TSA Report availed critical information on the value of the Tourism economy which should energise us to work hard in our pursuit of the sectoral target to reach a US$5 billion economy by 2025.
“The results presented indicate that as at 2018, the Tourism economy was estimated at US$1 964 592 880, hence our work is cut out as we need to achieve a two-fold growth target to achieve a US5Billion Tourism economy by 2025.
“In essence this technology will provide the international standard for a systematic summary of national economic activity from a functional perspective thereby allows for the harmonization and reconciliation of tourism statistics from an economic or National Accounts perspective.
“This enables the generation of Tourism economic data such as Tourism Direct GDP that is comparable with other economic statistics,” She said.
In addition, she said, the TSA report identified the consumption of domestic tourism statistics, Government was cognizant to the low consumption of the domestic tourism and we need to do more to champion increased internal tourism.
Another key input from the TSA report was the glaring fact that most people were not using formal accommodation when they visit the country.
“I urge the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority to intensify efforts to clamp down on all unlicensed tourism players countrywide so that we close these leakages,” she said.
She said the ZimBho campaign had risen numbers for domestic tourism and would ill continue working hard on that front, to promote domestic tourism.
As you may all know and appreciate, the Tourism Satellite Account is an internationally recognised tool which is able to holistically account for the performance of the tourism sector in a given economy.
It is one of the anchor projects outlined in the National Development Strategy (NDS1), which the Ministry has to deliver on, as part of our results chain framework. I am therefore delighted on behalf of the Ministry to witness this great achievement.
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