Due to the growth of Uganda’s tourism industry, the government has embarked on investing more money of $1.2 million in the marketing scheme in addition to the $1.5million one injected in last year.
The government will recruit three more public relations firms from china, japan and Middle East to promote Uganda as a tourism potential says the state minister for tourism, Godfrey Kiwanda. He further stated that each firm will spend $400,000 (UGX 1.4 billion) on the marketing activities.
Two years back, Uganda hired three marketing firms from United Kingdom, USA and Germany to increase the number of outbound tourists from the western world and each firm was given $ 500,000 (UGX 1.8bn).
Kiwanda addressed that the government is going to renew the latter firms’ contracts as these have done a good job of making Uganda as a prime tourism destination and adding more firms will better the promotion.
While addressing the journalist Kiwanda said that marketing Uganda as a tourism potential has been so fruitful as there has been an increase of German tourists of 17 percent.
He further stated that Uganda received 1.37 million tourists last year and it has a mission of receiving 5 million tourists by 2022.
According to World Bank, tourism is the major leading foreign earner of Uganda $ 1.4 billion yearly which is 26 percent of the total foreign exchange.
The World Bank helped Uganda to negotiate the contracts with the public relation firms in November 2017.
