Rwodzi tips of deploying escorts, establish caravans for rural tourism

Minister of Tourism and Hospitality Industry, Barbara Rwodzi has expressed the need for community involvement and engagement as prerequisites to realise viability of the lucrative sector; while announcing preparations to deploy rural tourism escorts and [erect] caravans as recipes towards sustainable transformation.

Speaking during the inaugural Tourism and Conservation Conference in Harare this Thursday, Minister Rwodzi reiterated that there is need for embracing heritages amongst communities and make sure they benefit from resources within the confines of their localities.

"It is high time that the industry [Tourism] should embrace working closely with communities where they package their respective heritage units, diverse cultures, norms, values, traditions and identities; while unlocking benefits attached to it in relation to tourism," Rwodzi said.

"Communities should earn a living from the value driven by heritages within their contexts. To complement this, there is a need for our industry to recruit and deploy tourism escorts or officers while establishing rural caravans to generate income from our localities," Rwodzi added.

"Just like the Environmental Management Agency (EMA), the tourism industry should therefore deploy tourist information officers who provide travel, hospitality and accommodation information to tourists, promote tourism, and assess tourist opportunities for local communities," Rwodzi added.

In this regard, tourism officers are responsible for promoting tourism and devising tourist development initiatives or campaigns with the aim of generating and increasing revenue.

Minister Rwodzi also tipped about complementing United Nations sustainable policies related to tourism.

"The United Nations tourism has policies for sustainable tourism and one of them is to go green. The other one is to involve communities at every level, which is what we are working on," Rwodzi noted.

"We are including that in our strategies to see how we involve communities in tourism through providing employment and infrastructure for them," Rwodzi said.

The Wild Africa Fund's Southern Africa director, Guy Jennings said there was a need to continuously tell the Zimbabwean story to bring in more tourists.

"Zimbabwe is blessed with wildlife and some of the best national parks in the world.  We want to help bring in more people to tour the country," Guy Jennings said.

The inaugural event was running under the theme 'Making Tourism Easier and Bigger Through Wildlife'.