Ghana's Minister of Tourism, Culture and the Creative Arts, Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare is advocating a closer collaboration between Africa and its European partners to accelerate tourism investment and development.

According to her, this has become even more critical in a country like Ghana which has started a process to train about 10,000 lower to middle level manpower to improve service delivery and thereby boost the sector’s contribution to economic development.

The Minister who is leading Ghana's delegation at the 35th edition of the FITUR international tourism fair ongoing at Feria de Madrid in Spain was contributing to a panel discussion on the topic "Investing in human capital" at the Tourism Investment and Business Forum (INVESTOUR) at the fair.

“We cannot leave human capital out of a discussion on sustainable tourism because you can have repeated visits only when you have trained your people well and they have treated their guests very well. And in order to get a good human capital base, I think the time has come for Africa to collaborate with Europe on the way forward. It is trite that some European countries have taken the lead in respect of tourism – having done it for so many years.  We do not have to re-invent the wheel, we can fly on their wings to move faster and so I think the time has come for us to do this to enable the sector create the needed revenue and jobs in the economy” she noted.

The Minister said in Ghana, a 15 - year National Tourism Development Plan is being implemented to prioritize Research and Human Capital Development among others. In this light, she disclosed that Ghana is in the process of transforming the Hotel, Tourism and Catering Training Institute (HOTCATT) into a National Hospitality Academy to help improve industry human resource capacity and standards.

“She added that Ghana has already set the pace of utilising continental human resources by approaching Kenya to assist in the transformation of HOTCATT but added that an European partnership is still welcome in this regard.

Participants at the forum observed that though there are unemployed graduates all over Africa, there seemed to be deficits in human capacity in the hospitality industry. They called for the sharing of experiences and success models, diversification of product offerings, and value addition to help address the challenge.

There was also suggestions on the need for some intensive short courses and training programmes to be oranised for unemployed graduates who want to pursue hospitality as a profession but lack the requisite educational and technical qualifications.

FITUR is a global meeting point for tourism professionals and the leading trade fair for inbound and outbound Ibero American markets.

Available statistics indicate that in 2014 alone 9,083 exhibiting companies from 165 countries/ regions, 120,231 trade participants and 97,549 people from the general public, met during FITUR to transform leisure into business and business into development. Also noteworthy was the presence of  7,368 journalists from 60 countries, a turnout that demonstrates the importance of FITUR on the international circuit of tourism sector events.