Sustainable Destination Management
Strategies in the OIC Member Countries
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Forest National Park, and Queen Elizabeth National Park. Through the Ministry of Tourism, the
World Bank has also shown further interest in funding tourismactivities, a potential opportunity
for UWA to attract some funding from the World Bank too.
The World Bank have also funded infrastructural developments in Uganda for tourism. A five-
year project ending in 2007 aimed to establish new offices for the Uganda Wildlife Authority,
develop infrastructure in the 10 national parks and 12 wildlife reserves, build staff quarters in
all the parks, demarcate all the parks and reserves, procure equipment such as tractors for road
maintenance in parks, procure vehicles, radio equipment, as well as construct boreholes and
plant trees around Mt. Rwenzori and Mt. Elgon National Parks. However, whilst ultimately the
program was supposed to boost UWA’s revenue collection, minimize poaching of key species,
lead to the increase in the population of key mammal species in Queen Elizabeth, Murchison
Falls and Kidepo, among others, the program was stopped over investigation for the misuse of a
significant amount of funds.223
There are a number of Conservation NGOs within the region (BMCT, IGCP, AWF, etc.) supporting
conservation activities. Bwindi-Mgahinga Conservation Trust was formed with the aim of the
long-term survival of Bwindi and Mgahinga National Parks. Annually, 20% of the Trust support
given out is meant for park operations. However, there has always been inadequate monitoring
of this support to ensure that it meets its intended objective. Following the above funding
challenges, it becomes necessary to identify various funding sources to make BINP flourish. As
mentioned before, the supporting NGOs will continue to support conservation in this area and
therefore it is incumbent upon management to identify areas where proposals should be written
for support both by national NGOs and the regional ones including UNESCO and BINP. Through
AWF under the Tourism for Biodiversity (T4B) project, USAID is funding activities in Kidepo,
Murchison Falls and Lake Mburo National Parks.224
Monitoring Tourism Sustainability
Sustainable tourism in Uganda is currently predominantly focused on growing and sustaining
the visitor numbers to ensure the sustainability of the sector as a whole. UTB have embraced
electronic methods of monitoring and evaluation in the last couple of years to help produce more
timely reports and improve the organization’s performance. In order to meet the demands of
tourists, UTB need to understand their visitors better and formulate more targeted marketing
strategies. Visitor exit surveys have become an annual norm to guide UTB operations and at the
close of 2016/17 they conducted a visitor survey to understand the levels of visitor satisfaction
with their Ugandan tourism experience. However, the research unit only has one staff member
which affects the productivity of the unit. This is presented as a challenge in the scarcity of
tourism statistics andmakes it difficult to monitor andmeasure performance or the organization
and the tourism sector at large.225
Uganda is strong on sustainability as a vision but weak in implementation on the ground,
especially outside its protected areas. UWA also recognizes that there is currently inadequate
223 International Trade Centre. (2011). Uganda inclusive tourism. Retrieved from
224 Uganda Wildlife Authority. (n.d.). Strategic plan 2013-2018. Retrieved from
225 Uganda Tourism Board. (2017). Performance Report: Financial year 2016-2017 . Retrieved from