Lilongwe, February 4: Ministry of Information, Tourism and Culture will map tourism in six regions to make sure that the market is well coordinated.
Director of Tourism in the ministry, Patricia Liabuba said this in Lilongwe, Tuesday during a day-long Via Via Tourism Academy envisioning workshop on new Tourism Policy and Strategic Tourism Plan for Malawi.
“This will change the way things were done in the past as we used to do at national level and coordination was a challenge, but with the mapping each region will have a committee to coordinate activities done within the region.
“The committees will also choose the type of tourism they want to have and we will be running competitions in the region,” explained Liabuba.
She added that the mapping will be done according to the type of tourism attraction the regions have such as lakes, parks among others.
Liabuba also said as one way of boosting tourism in the country, the ministry considered the upgrading of hotels in the country so that the facilities offered are in line with international standards.
She said the 2014 advert on Cable News Network (CNN) put Malawi on tourism map and that now people are able to know Malawi and as the ministry they now need to capitalize on the sector to meet the demand.
Liabuba said, “With the advert we have more demands of tourists and there is need to invest more in the sector to attract right investors to invest on right products in the country.”
Speaking earlier, Solimar International Program Director, David Brown said mapping tourism in regions will help the country achieve tourism goals adding that countries that mapped their tourism sector in regions are doing well.
“Malawi is rich with great tourism features, as it has great lakes and national parks. We are here in the country to collaborate in sector review and work with the ministry to create a common vision and identify priority action and measures of success in Malawi,” said Brown.
He said the country’s tourism challenges were lack of confidence in the ministry by private sectors, weak destination level marketing and absence of strategic tourism objectives and priorities among others.
He further said Malawi’s tourism 2020 is to be a destination vision, have five years Tourism Action Plan, define priorities for the tourism industry and have a clearly defined budget.
Speaking when opening the workshop Principal Secretary responsible for Tourism in the ministry, Elsie Tembo said the workshop was organized to strengthen collaboration with all tourism partners and also to work on the new Tourism Strategic Plan for the next five years.
“The Tourism Strategic Plan that we had expired in 2014 and now we do not have the Strategic Plan. We started working on the new one in April 2014 and we want to finalise it,”
