Client

Ministry of Finance

Location

Sierra Leone

Joint venture

Keios (Italy), The Journey (South Africa)

Period

2023 – underway

Project description

Sierra Leone possesses pristine beaches and islands, mountains and rich biodiversity, interesting wildlife, friendliness and rich cultural capital among people and its special place in the world history of anti-slavery movement as “the land of the free”; however, the tourism sector remains in a pre-emergent stage, with promising growth in visitor arrivals and investments cut short by the Ebola crisis and more recently by Covid-19.
Several issues have influenced the growth of the sector, such as: lack of proper infrastructure, facilities and services; poorly developed and difficult enabling environment; critical capacity shortages; severe binding constraints of air access and visa procedures/costs; uncompetitive and unfocused product; poor image; lack of appropriate funding for product development and marketing as well as for data management and statistics. Removing these bottlenecks will entail long-term destination planning to ensure feasible and sustainable tourism growth.
The Government of Sierra Leone has prioritized tourism as part of its National Development Plan 2019-2023 and has received funds from the World Bank to implement the Sierra Leone Economic Diversification Project (SLEDP). One component of this project aims to improve the performance of Sierra Leone’s tourism sector through an integrated destination approach.
Against this backdrop, the joint venture of Keios with The Journey has been entrusted a consultancy to develop a national strategy and action plan for a period of 5 years. The plan will build, among others, on the Marketing strategy (developed by The Journey in 2020-2021) and the tourism destinations viability studies (conducted by Keios in 2019-2021). The plan will adopt a participatory approach to ensure the involvement of various stakeholders such as the private sector, the government, the communities and civil society. The focus will be on sustainable tourism development and empowering women, youth and minorities through tourism.

Scope of Services

Situational analysis, Vision statement, Strategy and Action plan.