Kenya’s natural location would be ideal for many would-be travellers. Of
the few cities I have visited, Nairobi is one where you don’t need an
air conditioner. The unusual mix of wildlife and admirable hospitality
industry would attract any average tourist. PHOTO/FILE
Kenya turned 50 with remarkable improvements on many fronts.
The
population is burgeoning and provides a critical local market, levels
of education are comparatively higher than those in many African
countries, and organised groups such as the Kenya National Union of
Teachers are the strongest in the continent.
Other
sectors such as banking, retail and infrastructure have generally
improved despite recent increased (and ill-advised) transaction costs.
The
two sectors that have not really joined the party are agriculture and
tourism. For the time being, I’ll concentrate on the latter. We have
consistently under-achieved our tourist arrivals projections in the past
50 years.
NATURALLY ENDOWED
Kenya’s
natural location would be ideal for many would-be travellers. Of the
few cities I have visited, Nairobi is one where you don’t need an air
conditioner. The unusual mix of wildlife and admirable hospitality
industry would attract any average tourist.
The logical
question then is why we have hardly attracted over a million tourists
annually. There are equally complex questions surrounding the actual
trickle-down benefits of tourism in addressing perennial social and
racial inequities, but I pass that for now. My feeling is that we must
take a second look at our tourism policy and implementation strategies.
One
discomforting thing about being a member of the Kenyan diaspora is the
number of people who associate you and the country primarily with
wildlife safaris and long-distance athletes.
Safaris
and athletics are certainly good brands but by their very nature, they
may never increase our tourist arrivals. They also obscure important
dimensions to tourism that have worked well elsewhere. This is where
policy needs to change the most.
Our emphasis has been
on casual and repetitive mentioning of the need for wildlife
conservation and corresponding foreign exchange earnings. There’s a
dearth of policy and strategy when it comes to personalising the
industry and linking it with other sectors like academia.
Perhaps
my experience may modestly explain this. Over the past three years, I
have witnessed a pattern of increased spending in research and
development by governments and industry across most advanced nations.
But
most of these activities are still concentrated in the North and
closely associated with the advanced and emerging economies like Brazil,
Indonesia, India and South Africa.
A plausible
explanation for this is that research and development projects, as with
many aspects of life, often thrive on personalised interactions and
networks. These are sometimes lifelong and trans-generational.
You
really only want to collaborate with someone you can work with. Despite
this obvious fact, nearly all researchers and participants in academia I
have met easily confess their lack of partners and contacts within
Africa’s academic scene.
Simply put, inevitable
dimensions to tourism such as academic and sports conferences haven’t
found sufficient policy attention. The growth in the number of
universities hasn’t necessarily led to rigorous intellectual competition
when it comes to knowledge generation.
DOMESTIC THEMES
To
the contrary, most universities are still inward looking. Most
organised conferences are rather localised with exhausted domestic
themes.
This is precisely why proactive and
outward-looking government policy on tourism is necessary. Both Malaysia
and Thailand have phenomenal tourism industries compared to Kenya
although we’re culturally not so distant. Comparatively, they also have
highly educated populations.
But China’s is a slightly
different story. While we’re readily fed with negative aspects of its
statist policies, in practice, the Deng Xiaoping era created a breed of
high-calibre intellectual community that drives its increasingly
competitive universities.
China also implements
aggressive funding schemes for its citizens in academia at home and
abroad. The result is that these countries are increasingly popular
destinations for reputable conferences and research collaborations.
Blended with its natural beauty, favourable all-round climate and advanced supporting sectors, Kenya can thrive too.
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