Soaring public and private debt is also preventing investors from injecting fresh capital.
The drop in investments was revealed on Friday at a two-day Zimbabwe Investment Summit 2024, hosted by the diaspora in partnership with the Ministry of Finance, Economic Development, and Investment Promotion, with other partners in South Africa. “Our national strategic intent is to become upper middle-income country with people that have self-respect and dignity by 2030,” said Tourism and Hospitality minister Barbara Rwodzi. “Tourism and hospitality in addition to agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and other sectors. “The tourism and hospitality industry is the third largest contributor to the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP). ” Zimbabwe’s risk factor is associated with the abuse of property rights, human rights abuses, closing of independent spaces, violent attacks by the state, increased cost of living from an inflationary environment, and taxes.
Such challenges have turned away tourists and fresh investment in Zimbabwe.
Rwodzi said tourism and hospitality contributed a significant 5,7% to the national gross domestic product and 3,5% to the total employment in the country, indicating room for more growth. “Our goal is to promote and develop our tourism so that it moves two places up to become the single largest contributor to our national GDP or at least to double its contribution to the same,” she said.
Part of the strategy by the Tourism and Hospitality Ministry will be to target specific clusters for growth.
These include the rural tourism cluster, sports tourism cluster, religion cluster, business cluster, culture and heritage cluster, wildlife cluster, holidaying cluster, and medical tourism cluster. “Our Zimbabwe tourism investment promotion strategy is pursued within the 11 clusters with particular focus on (1) programming infrastructure, (2) workforce training infrastructure, (3) physical (facilities) and digital infrastructure (ICT related) and (4) tourism financing infrastructure,” Rwodzi said. 🔗 Read Full Article
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