National Museum goes to youth to promote heritage tourism

Mariam Said

THE National Museums of Tanzania (NMT) has launched a programme of motivating university and college youths to promote cultural and heritage tourism.

The programme dubbed “Museum University Hub” looks to compliment President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s effects of increasing tourism earnings for growing the economy and creating awareness to youths on their cultural heritage as one way of motivating while preserving cultural heritage sites in urban and rural areas.

NMT Senior Education Officer Ms Anamery Bagenyi said Dar es Salaam has the most cultural heritage sites with the huge untapped potential of attracting domestic and foreign tourists.

“This would have young people be creative to preserve the sites and market them for creating jobs and employ others,” said Ms Bagenyi over the weekend when guiding a Dar es Salaam city tour to 100 cultural and heritage students from the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM).

She said such a city tour was aimed at making youths who are the future tourist stakeholders promote a narrative of viewing Dar es Salaam as a home of cultural heritage tourist sites.

Some of the areas toured by the UDSM students are cultural heritage including artifacts found within NMT premises, monuments, oldest buildings and sites, symbolic heritage like a monument, historic artistic, ethnological or anthropological and social ways of life.

“There is an oldest standing buildings like Old Boma in Ilala District dating as early as 1800s, houses of worship and others signifying the transition of Dar es Salaam city from its early times known as a fishing village,” she highlighted.

The city tour also aimed at making the youths learn about cultural heritage imbibed in different types of food and ways of life along the Indian Ocean coastline which will catalyse increased touristic earnings if well marketed.

Apart from conducting city tours, NMT also nurtures youth with the best tourism ideas on how they can go to the next step tapping such cultural heritage sites and ways of making them generate income.

The head of state has already taken up measures, including acting and recording the Royal Tour film which has already reaped fruits by having an increasing number of foreign tourists visiting Tanzania’s natural wonders.