Browsing: Tourism

When rich folks want to climb to the highest peak of Africa, they no longer have to scrimmage with the rest of us along the old narrow foot tracks, no, they now have an exclusive route cut just for Very Important People (VIP).

In an unprecedented move, the government of Tanzania has decided to construct 25-kilometre of road up Mount Kilimanjaro in a bid to provide for the needs of the World’s richest.

The features of this VIP route have not been made public but it is expected to be exclusive, private and only for select few who can afford it. Tanzania, has some of the World’s must see tourist attractions that attract some of the World’s elite.

Arguably, a Prince so and so along with CEOs of multibillion dollar companies as well a Hollywood famous faces, would like to visit these attractions without attracting too much attention.

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Tanzania relays heavily on the tourism sector for its foreign exchange earnings and to save this vital sector, the country has announced plans to have all hotels and other tourist facilities across the country bear Covid-19 certificates that basically declare the facility a Covid-19 free area.

According to the Bank of Tanzania (BoT) the tourism sector is Tanzania’s top foreign exchange earner clocking USD 2.44 billion last year.  It only makes sense that the country would do all in its power to save the sector in the wake of the pandemic.

The move, to have tourism facilities display Covid-19 free zone poster is expected to build the trust of tourists and allow them to regain confidence in the hotels or related facility.

The said ‘posters’ will be the kind that health officers place in the windows of restaurants abroad with the grade of the said hotel in full display. The …

A few weeks ago, I was positively surprised to see a sign in a sports shop in Karen, stating that they no longer accepted cash, only cards and mobile money.  Until that time, “no-cash” policies in shops was something I had only seen in the Scandinavian countries, and even there, it is still rare. Since the start of the pandemic, however, digital-only payment policies have proliferated in Kenya, and are starting to become commonplace.

Cash as a payment method has been in a slow, terminal decline in Kenya for many years, but it has managed to survive, until now.

Kenya has long been a forerunner in terms of digital payments in Africa. Even as far back as in the Moi era, many shops and supermarkets, most upscale restaurants, and virtually every hotel accepted Visa and Mastercard.  This was at a time when Ethiopia had one single bank branch in the …

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is stealing the life out of the billion-dollar tourism industry in Tanzania, the government has already laid out a warning that at about 477,000 jobs could be lost, while revenue will shrink by 77 per cent if the virus outbreak endures hurting people past October this year.

According to the Tanzanian ministry of tourism, the number of tourists arriving in Tanzania rose from 1.3 million in 2017 to 1.5 million in 2018, whereas this increment made the sector to garner $2.4 billion (7.2 per cent increase) compared to 2.3 billion in 2017.

This means that the forex earning sector could collapse as the virus outbreak takes various dynamics over time and space in Tanzania, thus currently health authorities reports indicated 480 people have contracted the virus and 16 people succumbed by the virus.

Tanzania is one of Africa’s leading tourism markets, with exotic landscapes of the …

A WFP projection shows that some 265 million people in low and middle-income countries will be in acute food insecurity by the end of 2020. This is unless swift action is taken to ensure that food security is guaranteed.

Ironically, a majority of people who suffered acute food insecurity in 2019 were in countries affected by conflict at 77 million, climate change affected 34 million while economic crises hit 24 million people hard according to the Global Report on Food Crises.

In Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan, the Sudan and Nigeria are among 10 countries globally that constituted the worst food crises in 2019.

Starvation, death threaten Horn of Africa stability

61 per cent of South Sudan’s population was in a state of food crisis while the Central African Republic, Sudan and Zimbabwe had at least 35 per cent of their populations in a state …

There is need for Tanzania to involve the private sector to help it fight against illegal fishing if the country is to curb the devastating economic sabotage.

The country is now grappling with illegal fishing, but with the ever depleting amount fish in Lake Victoria and other inland water masses as well, it seems to be a losing battle this far.

The already trouble sector, contributing an average of 2.2 per cent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is taking more hits from illegal fishing.

So bad is the crisis that last month, while addressing the nation from the Lake City of Mwanza, the country’s President John Magufuli made a public appeal in to end the detrimental practice.

The president described illegal fishing as economic sabotage and warned that the nation is losing a vital natural resource, a key economic activity that provides daily livelihood for many and is a …

Binary code is a series of 0’1 and 1’s and thanks to the digital revolution that has since unfolded, these series of 0’s and 1’s and is, in multiple digits, lifting Africa out of poverty.

Take Tanzania for instance, a low income East African nation that now has the capacity to increase its annual tax base by a whopping USD 477 million should it better regulate, promote and develop the digital money industry in the country.

Other than the financial gains that are all too obvious, using digital transactions allows for increased transparency in government payments and reduced bureaucratic inefficiencies across most all government ministries and agencies.

Tanzania ranks way up there in Africa’s digital money penetration. In just a handful of years, Tanzania’s mobile money penetration has been unprecedented. With it, “Tanzania is building a firm foundation for strong and inclusive growth and we look forward to further progress,” …

Tanzania has set regional precedence by establishing an Atomic Energy Commission and gone ahead to start construction of a state of the art laboratory designed manage use of radioactive materials.

In Sub-Sahara Africa, the country is only second to South Africa in this frontier and has already begun the first phase of construction works. Valued at 2.5bn/- the first phase of the lab construction begun last year and is designed to meet global operation and calibration standards in atomic energy and nuclear.

It may come as a surprise to you as it did to me to learn of this rather unsettling development; a third world country building an atomic management laboratory to rival world standards. Well, that is the case until you learn that this third world country is also gearing to start mining uranium.

This explanation is plausible, as we have been predisposed to this reality by Hollywood blockbuster …

There is need to regulate the wage amount paid to labourers in Tanzania particularly in the construction industry  if the country is to reduce poverty levels and increase professionalism in the sector.

Last month I hired a Dar es Salaam based wage labourer to do some basic construction work for me. As he worked, we ventured into conversation deliberating the working conditions of wage labourers in the country.

‘Richie’ the only name he was willing to offer me, said his regular day starts before dawn.

“I have to wake up before the sun comes up,” he chuckles but maintains a somber look.

“You know, I live in the slums, so I have to get two buses to get to the site,” he continues after a moment of lamentation.  According to Richie, as a wage labourer, his job is never guaranteed, as he put it; “at the site, …

In Kenya, imagery has already been published for major cities, towns, roads and other places of interest…