It is understood, the green passport is a proof that a person has been vaccinated against COVID-19, received a negative test result, or recovered from the virus.
“The green passport holders shouldn’t be subjected to the COVID-19 Rapid Antigen Test at our airports. The essence of the green passport is to facilitate safe and free movement during the COVID-19 pandemic,” chipped in the TATO CEO, Mr. Sirili Akko.
Mr. Akko believes that the country has more to gain should the government lower the cost of a PCR test, add more testing centers, allow private hospitals and laboratories to test, and issue the certificates within 24 hours at the most.
“This is an opportune moment to revive the tourism industry and for cross-border-free movements to rekindle,” he noted, commending President Samia for her policy shift in her latest efforts to align the country with the rest of the world.
The TATO CEO advised the government to build the domestic capacity to be able to verify the authenticity, validity, and integrity of the certificates and whether they contain all relevant data.
Tourism, a major foreign exchange earner, employer, and catalyst of other businesses, had begun to recover from the shock of 2008’s global financial crunch and European debt crisis, which almost brought the multi-billion-dollar industry to its knees.
As it was in both the global financial and European debt crises, the ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism have sent shivers into the industry value chain, rural communities, and wildlife conservation drive.
This is due to the fact that the state-run conservation and tourism agency, Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) like tour operators, relies heavily on revenues from the tourism industry to run its operations such as corporate social responsibility and a conservation drive.
However, the rollout of vaccines in key source tourism markets offers a glimpse of hope that the sub-sector will bounce back bigger and better in the near future.
TATO has made deliberate efforts within its capacity in its latest initiative to restore tourist’s confidence in their health care.
The association, which is financially crippled and hence challenged to discharge its roles, owes the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) a lot for its backup to support tourism recovery and resilience initiatives.
To be precise, TATO developed basic health infrastructure support in the key tourism circuit, which entailed among other things, having ambulances on the ground, agreements with some hospitals to be used for tourist services in case of any contingency, and linking the project to the services of flying doctors, in an effort to revive the tourism industry so as to spur other businesses, recover thousands of lost jobs, and generate revenue for the economy.
More recently, TATO has managed to rollout in collaboration with the government, a COVID-19 specimen collection center in central Serengeti. Fortunately, these basic efforts have somehow started paying dividends by commanding some traffic and stimulating new bookings.
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