By Daniel Adu Darko
Accra, Oct. 10, GNA – The lack of a disbursement plan for the Tourism Development Fund in the Tourism Act is a cause of worry for the Ghana Hotels Association.
The Ghana Hotels Association has also expressed concerns about the Tourism Act, 2011 Act 817 empowering the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) alone to have total control over the decision-making and management of the fund without the involvement of the private sector.
The Association has therefore called for an amendment to involve the private sector in such major decisions.
Dr Edward Ackah-Nyamike, President of the Ghana Hotels Association told the Ghana News Agency that they had had a course to draw the attention of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Trade, Industry and Tourism over the fact that the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) had the sole mandate over the disbursement of the fund.
“We have had the course to draw their attention to a few concerns even to the extent that we brought it before the Parliamentary Select Committee on Trade, Industry and Tourism but our attention was drawn to the fact that the Ghana Tourism Authority was disbursing it based on the provisions in the acts and until the acts changed, there is not much that can be done”, he noted.
Dr Ackah-Nyamike said the Ghana Hotels Association (GHA) want to ensure that the private sector had some control over the use of the funds and also had some members from the associations serve on the tourism board instead of the President appointing members of the Board as enshrined in article 70 of the Constitution.
The Ghana Hotels Association President said that even though the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) was doing well using the money to do their work to help the industry, it was equally prudent for the trade associations to get support from the funds to help boost the private sector.
“Sometimes, we have training needs which we believe we can easily organise and undertake; we don’t get anything for that unless the GTA comes up and say it is organising a certain training for hotels or tour operators and then invite us”
“There is no training need assessment and no scale gap analysis which form the basis for which we were going to be trained for and so we just go and receive the training. To what benefit? We can assess our own training need, we can assess our scale gap and then develop our own training”, he noted.
Dr Ackah-Nyamike said the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) used its discretion to lend support to any trade association but that shouldn’t be the case, he said, insisting that there should be a disbursement plan.
GNA