Akwasi Agyeman, CEO of Ghana Tourism Authority
The Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) and the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture has begun training for tourism and hospitality sector players, under the “Tourism Sector Skills Revitalization Project”.
The training programme, which forms part of the sector’s share of the Ghana CARES project, according to the GTA, would be done within 18 months and would benefit close to 10,000 beneficiaries nationwide.
The tourism sector skills revitalization project is meant to upgrade skills for sector operators through the entire tourism value chain, with a special focus on the transportation and customer service subsectors in the value chain.
Speaking at the commencement of a four-day training of trainers programme for inspectorate staff of GTA in Accra, GTA’s CEO, Akwasi Agyeman, said the authority’s expectation is to train at least 50 per cent of beneficiaries outside the Greater Accra region within the designated 18 months with a focus on customer service training and product knowledge training.
The inspectorate staff comprise the quality assurance and service delivery team of the Ghana Tourism Authority.
A chunk of beneficiaries who are expected to benefit from the nationwide training by the inspectorate staff include drivers of car rental companies, taxi drivers at the airport, Bolt and Uber drivers, customer service personnel at various tourism facilities among others.
Part of the training project also includes French lessons for accredited tour guides at various tourist attractions in order to ensure some proficiency in the language for frontline staff at these sites.
Under the language proficiency training, 500 tour guides have been targeted to benefit from these exercise in collaboration with the French Embassy in Accra.
Mr. Agyeman said the purpose of the language training is to equip customer service personnel in the sector to effectively communicate with tourists from neighbouring and Francophone countries, in relation to the recently launched Domestic and Regional Tourism Campaign designed to stimulate the local tourism industry.
The Regional Tourism Campaign which has many targets also hopes to increase international tourist arrivals from the West African sub-region from the current 180,000 to 400,000 by 2024.
Other areas of the training would comprise the deepening measures towards the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in the sector, security issues of concern to tourists who wish to visit Ghana, and the status of the implementation of the national tourism single window platform.
The tourism component of the Ghana CARES Obatanpa project targets tourism sector skills revitalization, which involves the training of various players within the tourism value chain.
The Ghana CARES (Obaatanpa) programme is a GH¢100 billion post-COVID programme to stabilise, revitalise and transform Ghana’s economy to create jobs and prosperity for Ghanaians over three years.