7.04 Mulugeta Feseha
Promoting Ethiopia’s Tourism
Ethiopia is endowed with natural, paleontological, archeological, historical and living culture tourism attractions. Based on these attractions diverse forms of tourism including: living culture tourism, history tourism, archeology tourism, paleontology tourism, park tourism, geotourism, agro-biodiversity and coffee tourism, rural tourism, conference tourism and sport tourism are in the process of expansion.
Ethiopia’s diverse tourism resources are widespread in almost all part of the country and about 84% of the Ethiopian population lives in agriculture based livelihoods. Therefore, any tourism development endeavor should address these basic facts while designing tourism development policy. Currently, the major impediments in tourism development in Ethiopia include: lack of scientific tourism resource mapping, problems in transforming tourism resources into products and lack of tourism implementation strategies and plans. To overcome these overarching problems eleven years of successive research have been carried out by professionals from different departments of Addis Ababa University and have come up with the following outputs:
1) Developed a basic template and conducted a comprehensive tourism resource mapping of six major tourism routes (northern, northeastern, eastern, southeastern, southern and western routes) in Ethiopia.
2) Designed tourism product development which includes socio-cultural, economic, and environmental context analysis; destination development, and destination management.
3) Developed an environmentally friendly and community based implementation packages. These include: designing awareness creation, training and education programs to community on tourism resources, services and benefits; on how to develop micro financing arrangements, fund raising, grants, and credit schemes; creating development partnership schemes; and linking Ethiopian tourism with local agriculture and other economies.
In this panel, the aforementioned research outputs and specific topics related with religious and cultural tourism attractions of Ethiopia and tourism governance structure that works for the Ethiopian context will be presented and discussed.
ACCEPTED PAPERS
| Dr. | AHMED HASSEN OMER | Pilgrimage Centers in Ethiopia: an alternative Route for Tourism Development |
| Mr | BANTALEM TADESSE TEDLA | Controversies over the Benefits and Challenges of Tourism to the Rituals of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church with Particular References to Amhara Region |
| Mr | DAWIT TEFERI ANBESSIE | Birdwatching as Additional Product at the Established Tourist Destinations of Ethiopia: the Case of Axum and Lalibela |
| Mr | MOHAMMED JEMAL AHMED | Barriers of Tourism Development and Tourists’ Flow in Eastern Ethiopia |
| Dr. | MULUGETA FESEHA | Tourism resource mapping and establishing Ethiopia’s grand tourism routes |
| Dr. | NISHIZAKI Nobuko | Dynamics of cultural tourism, wildlife tourism and local community in southwestern Ethiopia |
| Ms. | YUN Ohsoon | Situating Coffee Tourism in Ethiopia |
| Mr | TSEGAY BERHE GEBRELIBANOS | The Ethiopian Arho Rock Salt Caravan-Trading Tourism Route |