Infrastructure development within Africa is needed. There are political and economic issues to face. There is a need for more regional integration and government investment, as discussed by Mossadeck Bally in this TV show.

Infrastructure development for industry growth

The biggest challenges are political stability, we desperately need political stability. We desperately need more regional integration, East Africa, West Africa, North Africa, South Africa. Actually Africa should be a federation of five states, East Africa, West Africa, North and South, that’s enough. So we need integration. We need political stability. We need for example, visa, visa is a problem. We can have one visa for East Africa, one visa for West Africa, and that’s enough. We need clear development, tourist development plans, like investment in infrastructure, more airline connections. So the challenges are political, are economical, one more challenge is to have less corruption. We really need to work on that to have less corruption, because corruption make the cost of investment go up. So if we have less corruption our costs will come down. _____________________________________________________________________________________ The Hospitality TV Channel will continue to follow the industry infrastructure development issues in regional markets including Africa, Asia and Europe.

Government investment is necessary for further industry development in Africa. There could be improvements in training, infrastructure,  competition and promotion of the continent, as Mossadeck Bally discusses in this Hospitality TV show.

Government investment in Africa

For me the first area win which they should invest is skilled labour. An example, in all West Africa we don’t have a hotel management school. So we desperately need the government to really focus on training from the bottom to the upper management on training. For me, that’s most important thing. You cannot say that tourism is important. Tourism is a very important sector. We need to attract tourists but you need to train first people. Second one is infrastructure, we need airports, we need roads, we need airline connections. Airline fares especially in West Africa, airline fares are too high. So tourists don’t come because it’s too expensive. So we need to take these prices down. And we need competition. In most of our countries we don’t have competition, for example in my country Mali, Air France has the monopoly. So we need to attract more international big airlines to Mali, to Burkina Faso, to Ivory Coast so that we can bring down the cost of the tickets. And the third thing is promotion, we really need to have a very good promotion for our country. So these are for me the two key sectors in which government should invest and then I will add a fourth one which is integration – regional integration. As a country we are too small, Mali is a very small country, Burkina is a small country. But as a region then we start becoming interesting for investors. __________________________________________________________ The Hospitality TV Channel will continue to follow government investment issues in regional markets including Africa, Asia and Europe.  

The African government can help build the right infrastructure for the hospitality industry to grow as Grant Thornton's  Gillian Saunders discusses in this TV show.

African government and hospitality

They can do more to assist them through all sorts of things, from tax dispensations, through importing furniture and equipment which can sometimes be a total trial, property rights and zoning and processes for environmental impacts and zoning assessments.  Try to get some sort of consistency. There’s also the marketing, destination marketing’s pretty non-existent, pretty weak as a general rule. Then there’s, you know, what every industry needs is infrastructure. The continent won’t develop without the infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn’t work the tourists are not happy, the roads, the water, the electricity, all of that. It’s a holistic enabling environment but there are some tweaks you need for tourism and hospitality to work better.  And those are challenges, you know, tax regimes are just different from country to country, import regimes are different from country to country.  You’ve got to learn again in each one you operate in. _______________________________________________________________________ If you enjoyed this video about African government and hospitality why not watch more TV shows on The Hospitality Channel?