Description:
Tanzania‟s economy is largely driven by its natural resource base; a system that is necessary for
development of key sectors of the economy including tourism, mining and agriculture.
Tourism sector has shown an impressive growth over the past few years and increasingly, the
sector becomes an effective means of macro-economic diversification from the traditional
reliance on agriculture. For the past ten years the sector grew at an average annual rate of 12%.
The country received 1,095,000 international visitors in 2013; most of them came from Britain,
Germany, the United States and Italy (World Bank, 2015). The sector contributes 18% of the
country‟s GDP and 30% of export earnings, with the earnings from tourism in 2013 topped
US$1.88 billion, up from US$1.7 billion in 2012 and US$1.45 billion in 2011(Anderson, 2014).
Over the past ten years, tourism has contributed extensively on employment; accounting for
10.9% of total employment in the economy (NBS, 2014; WTTC, 2014). The sector supports 1.2
million direct, indirect and induced jobs (Blancke and Chiesa, 2013; National Bureau of
Statistics, 2014; World Bank, 2015), whereby the direct jobs are around 500,000 (Figure 1.1).
Investment in the sector accounts for 9.5% of total investments in the country (WTTC, 2014)