Africa as a parallel universe

Although Africa is not the centre of world tourism and will not be for the foreseeable future, tourism is important for Africa. African tourism has grown in international tourist arrivals, but its present 3-5% share in world tourism is, viewing its land surface and population, a clear under representation. The great magnet for global tourism still is the Mediterranean area, where over 40% of all world tourism is destined for, but also tourism to Asia amounts to 15% of arrivals. The prognostics of the UNWTO before the credit crisis suggested a doubling of tourism arrivals and revenues in the next 15 years, a growth of over 3-5% per year and after the crisis does so again. During the crisis in 2009 global tourism slumped with – 4%, but African tourism continued to grow, 8% for Sub-Saharan Africa, 4% for North Africa, with a prognosis of 5.5 market share for 2010, boosted slightly by the WC 2010. The data on the first half of 2011 show a general increase of 5% in arrivals, and a steady growth of 9% for Africa. Though Africa does show a gap between tourist arrivals and expenditures, income from tourism is crucial and tourism investments are considered to be the most profitable.

Not only is tourism unevenly distributed among continents, also within Africa the distribution of tourists between sub regions and countries is extremely skewed; roughly speaking, Northern Africa takes one third of the market share, southern Africa one third, Eastern Africa a quarter, Western Africa 10%, and the whole of Central Africa has to do with the remaining 1%.