Wildlife website to cost sh245m

The Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) is building a new wildlife Portal at a cost of $100 000 (about sh245m), top officials have announced.

The site will be used to market Uganda as a top tourist destination and to enable online bookings and payments. Adrew Seguya, the UWA boss said the site is being build in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and will be ready by March.

“We are working on a new interactive wildlife portal with USAID. On it we will be able to update animal distributions in real time to ease planning. It will be the best in Africa when completed,” he said.

Seguya was addressing an Association of Uganda Tour Operators (AUTO) meeting at Serena Hotel Kampala on Monday where he was the Guest speaker. He said the Glass wall in the departure lounge of Entebbe will be branded with various animal images in effort to market Uganda as a top tourist spot following last week’s rebrand of the airport.

 “A giant gorilla effigy will be placed at the airport with the words “this is gorilla country” in the second phase of rebranding,” Seguya said. The wildlife body recently invited bids through the New Vision for the provision of the provision of a Cashless Revenue collection Management System to enable cashless payments and to track tourists while within the parks.

Boniface Byamukama, the AUTO president, said the increase in membership by 60 t0 125 members had necessitated and upward revision of membership fee.

He disclosed that recent positive media reviews of the country as the 2012 top destination had increased tourist numbers with all resorts in a National Park fully booked between December 16 and 25.

Tourism plays a vital role

For the first time the New Vision has had the front page tourism headline. The first story entitled “Uganda first choice tourism destination” and a few weeks later the paper carried another article entitled “Bye bye Bujagali”. This has scared some of us in the tourism industry. Uganda has several tourism attractions ranging from Mountain Gorillas, over 1 000 species of birds, the snow caped Rwenzori mountains, among others. 

That is why during CHOGM 2007, Uganda was marked as a country “Gifted by Nature”. It is true several developments have been achieved including establishment of an independent ministry of tourism and wildlife. That, not withstanding, however, many of the features that are supposed to attract tourists to Uganda are Under threat. For example Bujagali which has been only second to the Lake Victoria falls is now gone though we still have some rapid downstream. The issue of Mabira is not yet resolved yet Mabira is one of the surviving peri-urban tropical rain forests remaining in cetral Uganda. It is home to several primates and birds that could propel urban tourism in future. The issue of Uganda Musium is still in Court after a proposal to demolish it in favor of the East African Trade Center. 

The proposal to scrap government sponsorship of the course of tourism Management at Makerere University was strongly resisted by some of us. The discovery of vast oil deposits in the Albertine Rift Valley has not done tourism any good as it remains to be seen whether the flora and fauna in Uganda’s largest conservation areas of Murchison Falls and Queen Elizabeth will be spared. Tourism plays a very important role as it leads to sustainable foreign exchange inflow even amidst poor marketing abroad