Government investment in African hotel industry
Categories:
Africa,
Government,
Investment,
Operations
Tags:
infrastructure,
tourism sector,
training
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.
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The Hospitality TV Channel will continue to follow government investment issues in regional markets including Africa, Asia and Europe.