The Ministry of Tourism, Arts, and Culture is seeking media support for the Destination Ghana Project to enhance the tourism industry and increase its contribution to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The Destination Ghana Project is aimed at attracting four million domestic and international visitors to diverse tourist sites across the country.
This was made known by Dr Ibrahim Awal Mohammed, the Minister of Tourism, Arts, and Culture during an Editor’s Forum aimed at rallying media backing for the industry’s growth.
He underscored that the project’s objective is to amass revenue exceeding 6 billion dollars and generate more than 150,000 job opportunities over 4 years.
“The Destination Ghana project, is a four-year project between now to 2026. Two million international arrivals, two million dollar domestic arrivals. After this engagement today, subsequently, we are going to engage all key stakeholders. Next week or the next two weeks we are going to have an engagement with the private sector. We engage the business community, academia and then the diplomatic community. All this is aimed at ensuring that everybody appreciates the sense of activities.”
“…Each tourist who come to Ghana spend an average between $2000 and $3000. So if you have two million people coming, that makes it $6 billion within four years. That makes it the number one contributor to GDP…We think that within four years, tourism should contribute $ 6 billion per annum to our economy,” he said.
He added that the government seeks to launch a GH¢100 million tourism enterprise project to encourage the youth to bring up ideas to improve tourism in the country.
“We are very peaceful, we are hosting AfTCTA and Ghana is the centre of diaspora engagements. The diaspora loves Ghana because of the year of return and beyond the return. Next year, we are going to launch a 100 million cedi 1000 enterprise project to encourage young people to give us projects on sustainable tourism.