Tourism Levy fetches GH¢6.48m in 20 months
Contributions into the Tourism Fund, which started in October 2012, have accrued GH¢6.48 million as at July 2014.
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The Ghana Tourism Authority has said disbursement would start this month and would be used to fund tourism development prjects and initiaves specified under the law, the Tourism Act, 2011 (Act 817).
It mentions marketing and promotion of tourism, capacity building, market research and development of tourism infrastructure, development and promotion of other entrepreneurial activities as some of the areas that the fund can be applied to.
The list also includes tourism export trade-oriented activities of institutions and tourism education and training
This will be the first time that contributions into the fund will be used, 20 months after the levy was introduced.
The levy is one per cent of a visitor's total expenditure at a tourist site. It is collected by the tourism facility, which pays it into an account at designated banks countrywide.
The banks have started transferring their individual collections into the Tourism Development Fund (TDF), a creation of the Tourism Act, 2011 (Act 817). The fund is managed by a board and a fund administrator, appointed from the private sector, according to the law.
Hotels association react
The Ghana Hotels Association, a body of about 1,000 hotels and guest houses nationwide, is suggesting that initial inflows into the Tourism Development Fund (TDF) should be used to support capacity building of staff in the industry.
The President of the association, Mr Herbert Aquaye, said the country needed to develop a core of hospitality industry professionals who could properly manage every aspect of the industry.
"We need to have very well-trained professionals in the hospitality industry. We must train people, and must get ready as an industry, before we start promoting and bringing too many people into the country or we will embarrass ourselves," he said in an interview.
The call by the Hotels Association comes at a time when hotels are recruiting a number of their staff from other countries because of the country's inability to churn out qualified personnel that could take up certain critical positions in the industry.
About 80 per cent of senior management positions in the industry are occupied by foreigners, Mr Aquaye said in an earlier interview.
This, he said could be curtailed if revenues from the fund were used to build capacity of the local personnel.
"The second area that is of interest to us, is the proper development of tourism products. We must have a variety of tourism products which meet international standards. So, we must also embark on a major process of developing tourism products and improving the old ones that we have,” Mr Aquaye said.
He added that once both tasks had been completed, the country could then talk about marketing those products to the international community
The other sources of funding to the TDF, according to the law, include seed capital from the government, donations and grants, money earned by the operation of any project of enterprise financed from the fund or investments and other money that the Minister for Finance in consultation with Tourism Minister may determine with due approval of Parliament.
The Administrator of the TDF, Mr Abraham Tetteh, told the GRAPHIC BUSINESS that as of July 2014, nothing had accrued from those sources of funding.
That has caused the Tourism Authority and its mother ministry, the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts, to rely solely on revenues realised from the one per cent levy paid into the TDF.
Developing tourism
Earnings from the tourism sector have been on the rise since the late 1990s, rising from some US$237,200 in 1995 to US$1.87 billion in 2010 before peaking at US$2.5 billion in 2013, data from the Tourism Authority and the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts (MoTCCA) showed.
The 2013 earnings meant that tourism has overtaken foreign remittances to become the third highest foreign exchange earner after gold and cocoa.
The revenue potential of the sector, together with the need to diversify the country's foreign exchange sources, led to the creation of the TDF. It was in response to the funding gap in the development of tourism.
The Fund Administrator explained that payments into the fund were currently invested in a fixed deposit account at the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB).
The law mandates the board to apply proceeds of the fund into "relevant tourism activities as the board may determine.”
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