The Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities has decried low funding in the tourism sector despite contributing about 10% of the county’s GDP.
While presenting the Budget Framework Paper for FY 2022/23 before the Parliamentary Committee on Tourism, Trade and Industry on Thursday, the State Minister for Tourism, Bahinduka Martin Mugarra, said that Uganda’s tourism sector is the least funded among their giant counterparts in East Africa.
“The appropriation to the tourism sector has historically been below the threshold required for the industry to perform its role meaningfully. A sector that generates about 10% of the GDP cannot be continually allocated less than 0.4% of the national budget,” Mugarra said.
Whereas the Tourism ministry is seeking Shs259.1bn for FY 2022/23, the Ministry of Finance has allocated a Medium Term Expenditure Framework provision of only Shs176.9billion.
Statistics show that Uganda injects the least funds compared to other East African countries like Kenya and Tanzania. For example, in FY 2020/21, Tanzania and Kenya allocated more than 1% (Shs617.1bn and Shs532.9bn respectively) of their total budget to tourism compared to Uganda that allocated less than 0.5% (Shs197.3bn). This means that both Tanzania and Kenya injects 3 times more resources in tourism than Uganda and this has translated to more tourist arrivals. At least 7 in 10 visitors to Kenya or Tanzania are leisure visitors compared to Uganda where only in 10 visitors are leisure tourists.
The tourism sector in Uganda was seriously hit by COVID-19 with foreign tourist arrivals dropping by 69.3% to 473,085 from 1,542,620 visitors in 2019, causing a drop in foreign exchange earnings from US$1.6bn in 2019 to US$0.5bn in 2020.
