Available statistics indicate that though Ghana’s tourism sector annually makes almost $1.1bn in foreign exchange earnings, contributes about four percent of the national Gross Domestic Product and generates about 220,000 direct formal employments nationwide, the sector appears to be plagued by a lot of problems.

As the fourth largest foreign exchange earner after remittances from abroad, cocoa and gold, the tourism sector appears to be swarmed with deficiencies such as poor marketing and branding of the country as a tourism destination, low awareness of tourism potential as a viable economic sector, infrastructural deficiencies such as improper road access to tourist sites and little funding from government. This has led to poor publicity and development of tourist sites in the country.

Despite a 42-percent increase in employment registered by the sector from 90,000 to 127,645 between 2000 and 2003, and a projection that by 2009, the sector will employ about 300, 000 people, about 80 percent of the tourism potentials of the country remain untapped. Available figures also indicate that between1997 and 2007 hotel establishments nearly doubled from 751 to 1,430.

The average spending of a tourist as at 2006 was $1,985 while the average length of stay was 10 days. In that year, Ghana attracted 497,129 tourists. Thus, revenue accrued in 2006 totalled $986,801,065 implying tourism per capita in Ghana of $41.12 given the population figure of 22 million.

There is no gainsaying that some developing countries in Africa and elsewhere have taken to tourism as a reliable source of support for their economies, registering enormous gains from their investment into the sector. Such nations include Malaysia, Morocco, Mauritius, Kenya, Egypt and Singapore. These countries invested so much into developing tourism and are making gains.

Ghana's Tourism Ministry in spite of the aforementioned shortcomings, is aiming to help the country to attain a per capita income of $1,000 by 2015 through the realization of the sector’s full potential in contributing to economic wealth creation, employment generation, poverty reduction, environment conservation as well as national and international cohesion.

The Ministry further seeks to attract about a million tourists into Ghana annually with a corresponding growth in the expansion of tourism plants across the country including restaurants, pubs, night clubs and tourist receptacles.
Places of tourist attraction such as the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum now appear to be hosting wedding events instead of more tourists. And other interesting places which hitherto received media hype as attractive places cannot be said to be registering more visitors anymore.

This therefore places a lot of responsibility on the incoming administration, to as quickly as possible, give more attention to the sector and improve on existing policies so as to move the sector to its promised land especially increasing its budget for the Tourism Ministry and the Ghana Tourist Board to effectively carry out their mandates.

By Samuel Boadi

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