The government is undertaking a comprehensive renovation and modernisation of some major tourist attractions across the country, a move aimed at positioning Ghana as the subregion’s preferred tourism destination.
Key sites being refurbished include the Cape Coast and Elmina castles, and the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park among others.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo announced this on the floor of parliament when he delivered the State of the Nation Address, wherein he said the works are coinciding with a rebound in the nation’s tourism sector.
He disclosed that the number of tourists visiting the country last year almost doubled from the low of 355,108 visitors recorded in 2020 as a result of the pandemic.
“Last year, the country recorded some 623,523 visitors – up from the 355,108 visitors the year before, signifying a marked rebound of our tourism sector,” he said.
The president used the opportunity to remind the nation of the ‘Year of Return’ campaign’s success in 2019, while calling for a collective effort to see the sector return to pre-pandemic levels.
“With nostalgia, at the end of 2019 just before the onset of COVID – when the world came to Ghana in that ‘December to Remember’ – we were the happy place to be at the end of our Year of Return. Ghana continues to lead the push for an African renaissance through the decade-long ‘Beyond the Return’ project.
The ‘December in GH’ component of this project has positioned Ghana as the destination to visit every December. There is a need to recapture those glorious moments and build on them as government works hard to reclaim what has been lost to the COVID years,” he said.
Official data indicate that over the past five years, the average number of tourists to the country has been around 900,000. In 2019, however, Ghana welcomed some 1.13 million visitors.
