Africa has been at the receiving end of the monikers of others, from the pejorative dark’ continent of the 19th century to be labelled more recently, first, as hopeless’ and then, a decade later, as rising’ by The Economist. It’s high time for Africa to carve out its own epithet. The Conservation Continent is a positive option for many good reasons.
The Covid-19 pandemic is likely to amplify Africa’s development challenges essentially the result of high population growth and historically too low economic growth and accelerate the pace at which governments will have to act and deliver to citizens.
The immediate challenge for African leaders is to mitigate the worst effects of the crisis and to reposition the continent beyond Covid-19. The local-over-global reflex to the pandemic poses risks to African growth, such as those implicit in a deep-seated political call for businesses to go home, thereby reducing the reliance on outsiders.
As African leadership thinks about the longer-term imperative of diversification and transformation, they might have opportunities few of their counterparts elsewhere possess in allocating a greater share of land to conservancies, providing a new avenue for tourist development. A big policy bet on the environment today could pay unimaginable dividends, and quickly.
Certain sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture, mining and trade may recover relatively quickly once the Covid-19 crisis blows over, presuming there is a re-establishment of demand and supply in global value chains. Tourism is likely to be quite different, however, because it may never return to a pre-Covid-19 normal.
Until the crisis, global tourism seemed an unstoppable force for positive change. Tourism generated income of $562-billion in 2000. By 2019, revenue was estimated at just under $3-trillion, while the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) estimated the overall contribution of travel and hospitality to be $8.9-trillion, accounting for 10.3% of global GDP. Passengers, too, increased from 90 million to 1.5 billion over this time, while global employment (direct and indirect) stood at 330 million, or one in 10 jobs worldwide, with nearly $948-billion invested, or 4.3% of the global total.
In June 2020, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) forecast that the global tourism industry would lose at least $1.2-trillion during the year due to the travel restrictions and consumer wariness caused by the coronavirus pandemic. These losses, some 1.5% of the world economy, were projected to double if travel did not recover by March 2021, with the harshest effects on developing and island nations according to UNCTAD. Yet some major airlines, including Emirates, did not at the same time expect recovery until 2022.
Africa has been a relatively slow mover compared to other regions in the attraction of international tourists. In 2018 Africa received around 5% of the estimated 1.4 billion international tourist arrivals.
This should not undersell the importance of this lifestyle sector to the continent. To the contrary, the environment and its related tourism offerings remain a key comparative African advantage. The sectoral GDP contribution of tourism to Africa has picked up over the five years before Covid-19 to reach around 3% of GDP. This reflects natural assets of weather, wildlife and an appealing service culture. But African tourism, even pre-Covid was, however, vulnerable to the burden of long flights and dodgy airports, perceptions and realities of safety, onerous visa regimes, health risks, and the arbitrariness of a sometimes sullen and poorly paid bureaucracy.
It is certain that, at least in tourism, there will be a new normal. Africa’s challenge is to find a way to reposition itself to attract international travellers. For starters, mass-tourism may be at its end, with the old model of more tourists equals more money being replaced by more price-segmented holidays, with a focus on the high-end of the spectrum. Bums-in-seat tourism is unlikely to work as it once did in a post-Covid-19 world.
As the world shifts focus to quality of life issues, there is a link with the environment, where Africa could, with the right focus and prescient policy, enjoy comparative advantage.