The Gambian Tourist Value Chain and Prospects for Pro-Poor Tourism

Tourism in The Gambia: International ‘Best Practice’ in Poverty Reduction & Pro-Poor Growth Through Tourism
Draft Report (Friday 22 nd December 2006)
3 Overview of Tourism in The Gambia
Tourism is important to the macro-economy of The Gambia. The tourism sector contributes
13% to national income, well over 30% of total export earnings and about 20% of all private
sector formal jobs. As illustrated in Table 1, in the previous section, Gambia’s dependence
on tourism is high even for an LDC.
3.1 Supply
The tourism industry is geographically concentrated along a 10km strip in the Greater
Banjul Area (see Figure 2). Even for the smallest country in Africa, this degree of spatial
concentration in one corner of the richest part of the country is striking and has
implications for the pro-poor impact of tourism.
Figure 2:
The Gambia: Location & main tourist hotels
The Gambia is a small, well-established destination with a total of 7,000 beds and 3,000
rooms 21 . As well as being geographically concentrated, tourist activity is focused on a small
number of large hotels. Almost 90% of the tourist accommodation available in the country
is located in the 20 large hotels listed overleaf. Indeed, well over half the national bed
stock can be found in the seven largest establishments.
Most of the remaining beds can be found in 10 hotels ranging in size from 20 to 90 beds,
with a plethora of smaller guest houses, camps, inns, lodges, motels, apartments and rest
houses.
21 Emerging Markets Group Deloitte (2005) The Gambia Tourism Development Master Plan The Challenges
for 2005 to 2010 and the 2020 Vision Draft Final Report