ABUJA (National Planning Commission Report)
The National Planning Commission (NPC) has recently pledged to offer technical support in the area of training, data collection, M&E and capacity building to the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation (NTDC) in their effort to develop the tourism sector in Nigeria.
The Secretary to the Commission, Ntufam Fidel Ugbo made the pledge in Abuja during a courtesy visit to the NPC by the Director – General of the NTDC, Sally Mbanefo. Ugbo said that the Commission will assist the NTDC through the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) which is one of its Parastatals to capture data on visitors’ in-flow, identify the kind of visitors they are expecting and what the visitors would want.
Speaking earlier, the Director – General of NTDC, Sally Mbanefo, who led the delegation on the visit, requested for a working collaboration in the area of capacity building for staff. She explained that the objective of the NTDC is focused on 3 goals which include: rebuilding of NTDC, growing the tourism locally for job creation and income generation for the country and reinventing the Nigeria tourism sector.
Sally Mbanefo further mentioned some initiatives and projects that the NTDC under her watch has embarked upon since she took over as the DG of the corporation such as domestic tourism promotion, establishing information desks at Nigerian Airports to provide tourism calendar, creating National tourism calendar, visit to tourist sites in the six- geo – political zones in the country and embarking on the green city project.
She added that Nigeria has an amazing 7,000 tourism sites across the country with only few of them being developed, harping on the need for all Nigerians to join in promoting the Nigerian tourism sector which she said has the capability of creating jobs, revenue generation and also empowering the grassroots as the sites are located in rural areas, which will in turn discourage rural – urban migration.
The DG added that the security challenges in Nigeria should not serve as a discouragement to the growth of the industry, making reference to countries like Egypt with such security challenges and whose tourism sector is far better compared to what is obtained in Nigeria.
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