Cabo Verde, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, Tanzania and Mauritius are the African countries where tourism information is most up-to-date and available, according to a report by Lisbon’s Nova School of Business and Economics released on Wednesday.
The report “Africa’s Tourism Data Ecosystem – Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Growth” is available on the WiTH Africa platform, a 2022 Nova School of Business and Economics (SBE) initiative that is the result of a partnership between the Nova SBE Data Science Knowledge Centre and the Nova SBE Westmont Institute of Tourism & Hospitality, the university said in a press release.
The WiTH Africa platform serves to “assess the state of data provision by the national statistics agency of each African country and to analyse the tourism data available, the frequency of publication and the websites where it is made available”, according to the statement.
The countries are classified, with scores, using the ‘Ease of Access Score’ system developed by the platform.
The study “identifies that the northern and southern extremes of the African continent are where the countries that top the podium for the greatest and best accessibility of statistical data are located, with only 6 countries (Cabo Verde, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, Tanzania and Mauritius) achieving the highest score (4 on a scale of 0 to 4)”.
According to the study presented, there are marked differences across the continent: while the south and north have the best scores, the rest of the countries have only been classified as “moderate”.
Morocco and Tunisia, in the northern region, are the countries with the greatest accessibility and the most recent updates, while in the southern region the highlight goes to South Africa, which provides annual statistical reports.
In Central Africa, the Central African Republic does not record any tourism data, as does Gabon, while the Democratic Republic of Congo revealed good accessibility and recent updates.
In West Africa, Cabo Verde leads the countries with the highest and best accessibility to data, which is made available on a web portal, followed by Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone.
In the east of the continent, Tanzania and Mauritius lead the way in terms of accessibility, unlike Somalia and Burundi, which face numerous challenges in updating their data, noting that 2014 was the date of the last data record in Burundi.
Although platforms such as Open Data for Africa (ODFA) have promoted data sharing between African countries and organisations such as the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) have been important data providers, the data collected in this report shows that “there is an urgent need for internal investment to broaden data sources and reduce external dependence”.
“Tourism is one of the activities with the greatest potential for accelerating development in African countries,” said Sérgio Guerreiro, adjunct professor at Nova SBE and founding member of WiTH Africa, in the statement.
According to the professor, the aim is to offer acquired knowledge and “contribute to this agenda” (of tourism development).