An initiative to promote local tourism in East Africa has begun with a campaign launched to market the region’s tourist destinations.
This is after the Tembea Kenya Initiative expanded its base to also include other East African countries like Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Burundi and South Sudan.
The Tembea Tujenge Kenya (TTK) chief executive officer Andrew Kanyutu said they want to expand their reach to tourist destinations in the region after a successful campaign in Kenya that recorded exponential growth in domestic tourism.
The initiative initially focused on marketing Kenya as a tourist destination, but will now expand to cover the East African region bloc constituting seven member countries.
He said that the Kenyan drive – Tembea Tujenge Kenya, which began five years ago, has seen the team visit 38 out of the 47 counties in the last two years of phase two of the campaign, managing a 76,500-bed conversion locally.
This in turn saved more than 40,000 jobs in the hospitality industry and this gave them the impetus to look at the bigger picture.
“This is what we have directly tracked so you can imagine the ripple effect it has had indirectly,” Mr Kanyutu said.
The East African drive, he explained, targets more than 150 million citizens within the regional bloc where they aim to weed the region from overreliance on foreign tourists and instead grow their domestic tourism while at the same time stimulating the economic growth of the bloc.
This is done by documenting what is available in terms of tourism and marketing the same to Kenyans.
“We are seeing the birth of new inter-regional trade and tourism within East Africa. We realised it is time to target our neighbours and try to market them as a bloc. So we decided to have the Tembea Tujenge East Africa Mashariki which will now cover the seven member states,” Mr Kanyutu said.
The team is currently in Arusha where they will receive a mantle and the flag for East Africa by the East African Community (EAC) Secretary General Peter Mathuki on July 20, 2022.
After being officially handed the flag, the journey will start in Arusha, then flow to Uganda, DRC Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zanzibar, Burundi and eventually South Sudan.
Mr Kanyutu called upon the private sector to support the initiative, which has already received a boost from Isuzu, Presidential Delivery Unit (PDU), Tourism Fund and Safaricom.
“The objective is to ensure citizens build their economy by touring their own countries,” he said.
Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) chairperson Mr James Mureu said the regional initiative offers an opportunity to open up the region.
He said the only way to reach the regional tourist destinations is by visiting the countries and seeing what they have to offer and in the process breaking existing barriers.
This will grow regional and intra-Africa trade from the current 15 per cent and aim at levels of intra-European trade which is at 68 per cent.
“It is about time that we spread out into the region and who knows where the next frontier will be. It might even be the continent for TTK. For me that is a big dream,” said Mr Mureu.
