19 Nov 2019

Government has made strides in the privatisation and management of campsites by citizens in protected areas, especially National Parks to generate income and crate employment.

This was said by President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi when delivering the State-of -the- Nation Address on November 18.

He said currently out of 2 107 licensed tourism enterprises,1 577 were wholly citizen owned,369 were joint ventures while 261 were non-citizen owned.

He said the development of the tourism cluster had started with Ngamiland Tourism Cluster to provide learnings for rolling out clusters in other parts of the country.

Dr Masisi said in September this year government reviewed Tourism Policy, which he said highlighted several critical success factors to support its vision which included efficient management of National Parks, Forests and Game Reserves and other Wildlife Management areas, mainstreaming of tourism in Government, and planning process.

He said the policy also focused on  Improvement of access and infrastructure, meaningful citizen and community participation in the industry, enhanced public, private sector partnership and product diversification.

The tourism sector, he said was narrowly focused on wildlife and wilderness tourism, adding the development, diversification and expansion of tourism attracts and experiences and were pre-requisites for Botswana to expand its market reach and share.

“To achieve these, the policy intervention for product development and diversification will cover varies strategies,including broadening the tourism base by adding new product,pursuing tourism linkages such as mining, diamond tours, diamond shopping, agriculture game ranching and farming and arts and crafts,” he said .

The diversification, he said would also cover identifying underdeveloped cultural, natural attractions and sites with tourism potential and initiate a programme for upgrading and improving visitor’s access, interpretation and amenities at such locations.

President Masisi said government had also made significant efforts in empowering of citizens through privatisation and management of campsites in protected areas especially the National Parks.

He said in order to increase access and benefit to communities for sustainable livelihoods improvement,government would engage various strategies including, increasing the level of community and citizen participation, partnerships and involvement in the tourism sector by solely reserving the existing vacant concessions for allocation, to citizen companies or consortia of joint venture of community trusts.

Regarding a clean and safe environment, President Masisi noted that treated effluent discharged from the waste treatment facilities into the receiving environment remained a challenge, given that most of the waste water treatment plants generated effluent of poor quality that did not meet acceptable discharge standards.

President Masisi said as a way of  ensuring environment performance compliance, government continued to conduct audits and inspections of pollution generating entities, and indications from these monitoring activities suggest that most of these activities were non-compliant to environmental statutes and they were doing all to correct the situation. Ends