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Gambia to leverage Nigeria’s population to grow travel, tourism

Gambia’s Minister of Transport, Works and Infrastructure, Ebrimah Sillah said his country is leveraging on Nigeria’s huge population and the love of travel by Nigerians to rebuild its hospitality and tourism sector.
He explained that the hospitality industry in The Gambia was very strong until COVID harmed the sector as the country was badly affected and the travel sector nosedived.
Sillah and Boyo
He spoke to Aviation Metric during Overland’s inaugural flight to Banjul, The Gambia recently.
He however expressed his happiness for seeing tourism and travel pick up in his nation. He was hopeful that the country would get back to the numbers that it used to have, like 500, 000 visitors coming to the country annually.
His words, “Now, our ambition is to surpass this as quickly as possible. The arrival of Overland Airways will serve as a booster for our overall initiative to, I mean, enhance the travel numbers of the Gambia.
“As I said, I mean, our overall agenda is to have a domestication programme with Nigeria, just as we have it in Senegal. We want to also have a share of the huge travel market potential of Nigeria so that we can have Nigerian tourists coming to the Gambia as well. And it will be like a completely different experience that they have been going through in other countries.”
“We are doing the base arrangements now. Hopefully, with the summit that we want to have with the Nigeria Business Council and the Gambia, plus the travel industry, as well as the Ministries of Trade of both countries, led by the Ministry of Transport, we are hopeful that this will pay dividends.”
He stated that a lot of people in Nigeria probably may not be aware of the potential in the Gambia in terms of experience in travelling; the reason they want to sell the destination to them and the opportunities.
He further stated that doing so would hopefully bring in a renewed vigour of interest from Nigeria to the Gambian market.
The country he reiterated has taken a holistic view and assessed how it can grow trade and tourism in the small West African nation.
One of such strategy Sillah said was a meeting the government had with the African civil aviation authorities in the Gambia.
“On the last day of this meeting, the organisers brought in the finance, transport, trade and tourism ministers to sensitise them about how high taxes and charges are killing the African travel industry. At the end of that briefing, we all realised that, yes, it is important to follow the money, but it is also important to follow the volume and the numbers.”
“Because whenever people come to the country, what you lose as airport taxes, you gain from what they spend in your country and the time that they also spend here. So the economy of scale is there and no one is a loser in that”.
“Our Minister of Finance has come to accept that we have to pursue this domestication process very seriously. That is why we have been lucky to discuss it with Senegal. It has been something that we have been discussing for a long time.
“But we have kind of pushed it much harder when we realised the potential in reducing taxes in favour of the volume of travellers that are supposed to come to your country. Yes, and the Senegambia concept is that because we are like one in two countries or two in one country, I mean, our people are the same, we speak the same languages, we intermarry, we are the same people.”
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