- Manual milking of cows commanded attention and imagination
The government is coming up with agro-tourism programmes to diversify Botswana’s tourism product beyond sight-seeing and accommodation, the Minister of Agriculture, Fidelis Molao, told the 2022 HATAB annual conference in Kasane last week.
“We have said in our small field we must have a mixture of not just ploughing or farming but also have creative marketing in terms of our traditional ways of doing things,” Minister Molao said, citing activities like milking of cows. “All that we do, the tourist from oversees may want to experience it. Let us give them an opportunity to come and milk cows and do all the activities we do in our day to day lives at our fields.”
This should open opportunities so that tourism is not just wildlife. The minister said there must be ways to repackage and rebuild tourism such that it becomes diverse activities. “As we know it, the tourism industry is a big consumer of agricultural.”
While the Chobe and the Okavango represent the finest tourism destinations globally, Molao said “we must open up tourism in every little space”. He highlighted the creation of what he called contract farming. “It is an opportunity we seriously can look into so that local people can produce for you. You should not come from far away places and consume the same stuff you left back home,” he said, adding that it can be done “if we work with the tourism sector and local communities so that they (tourists) can marvel at who we are as a country”.
He called for a tripartite arrangement between his ministry, HATAB and farmers. Botswana Tourism Organisation (BTO) added its voice to aspirations of broadening the tourism base with more products and enhancing the geographical spread, emphasizing development of culture and heritage tourism. The Minister of the Environment and Tourism, Philda Kereng, also called for documentaries to package and brand tourism experiences and for embracing the cultural component so that “we can give the tourist more experience” because “they want to experience the food, the lifestyle of weddings, dances”. Other activities identified as potential growth opportunities by BTO include dam tourism and desert tourism (Khuis Development, Khawa).
The Chief Digital Officer at the Local Enterprise Authority (LEA), Onkabetse Moatlhodi, suggested gamification, cultural villages, heritage sites and virtual tourism, to name a few. Moatlhodi said moving away from the single wildlife/nature -based product to a multi-product and service approach that seeks to spread out tourism from national parks and wildlife management areas to the rest of the country will differentiate the Botswana offering from that of the regional bloc, leveraging the regional peculiarities to harness Botswana’s positioning.
Presenting on Re-imagining the Botswana Unique Selling Point in the Travel and Leisure Sector, Moatlhodi advocated spatial planning and designing to create wonder and re-imagining a people’s way of life in architecture, engineering, infrastructure, entertainment, technology and innovation. He proposed “breaking the mould, inspiring mankind and leading the pack in incorporating imagination/creativity into the national development plans”.
Moatlhodi drew lessons from Singapore’s next engine of growth, which includes establishing self-sufficient cities underground, Garden by the Bay and the Flower Dome, a cavernous cooled conservatory which holds the Guinness World Record for the largest glass greenhouse. He told the conference about the Channel Tunnel, often called the ‘Chunnel’ for short, a 50.45km long undersea tunnel linking southern England and northern France that was first proposed in 1802 but whose construction was not started until 1988 and completed in 1993, as well as Eurostar services that started in November 1994.
