About

Summary

The Kenya Tourism Federation (KTF) commissioned this study to investigate the importance of the tourism sector to Kenya’s economy.  Kenya had been a leader in the tourism industry for more than four decades, although performance was often variable, often beset by extraneous difficulties.  This study set out to estimate the value of tourism in Kenya, and through value chain analysis determine its competitiveness, the challenges It faced, and to make recommendations to accelerate growth and strengthen the industry.

Our Approach

The Kenya Tourism Federation was able to exercise its unique position in being able to elicit cooperation from all the various stakeholders in the tourism industry for this project, which provided us with unique access to information and data to develop the economic model.  During the first stage we undertook a detailed review of the Kenyan tourism sector, in particular looking at growing competition from other destinations, the findings of the previous value chain analysis study from 2010, and benchmarking the economic contribution of Kenya’s tourism.

The main phase of the study involved estimating the economic contribution of tourism to Kenya’s economy, including its contribution to foreign exchange earnings, direct, indirect and induced contributions to GDP, and employment/jobs generated.  A value chain analysis was used to identify the economic implications of the challenges to sectoral growth.

Outcome

The scale of the contribution of tourism to the Kenyan economy was found to be substantial, generating over 5% of GDP.  However, the value chain analyses found that public sector charges were too high, too many, and were not harmonised, and therefore needed to be urgently addressed as they were making the sector uncompetitive.

Domestic and business tourism had grown significantly over the previous five years, but required more attention to better understand these forms of tourism and develop products and destination activities that would meet their needs.