Sierra Leone minister impressed with Seychelles’ tourism industry |09 September 2022

Minister Radegonde welcomes Minister Pratt to Maison Quéau de Quinssy (Photo: Joena Meme)

The Minister for Tourism and Cultural Affairs of Sierra Leone, Dr Memunatu Pratt, has said she is very satisfied so far on the learning experience of our tourism industry and the warmth of the Seychellois people.

Minister Pratt made the statement to the press yesterday morning after paying a courtesy call on the Minister for Foreign Affairs & Tourism, Sylvestre Radegonde, at Maison Quéau de Quinssy.

Minister Pratt, who is accompanied by a high-level delegation of tourism officials from Sierra Leone's public and private sectors, including officials from the World Bank, is in the country for an official working visit to study our best practices in tourism destination management, development and marketing, done with emphasis on sustainability and to concretise further the bilateral cooperation between the two countries.

She stated that although the Republic of Sierra Leone has other resources, the country is looking to be more dependent on tourism and while looking at countries where the economy is solely dependent on tourism, Seychelles’ name came up which sparked an interest in our tourism sector.

“As tourism is one of Sierra Leone’s growth sectors, we have come to explore all possibilities of trying to learn from very successful countries, like Seychelles, where tourism is the mainstay of the economy, so that we can learn from it and boost our tourism sector,” she added.

Minister Pratt explained that they have been looking at other countries like Rwanda which has a good eco-tourism management and government-led programmes, “but for Seychelles it’s mainly because it is solely dependent on tourism and I wanted to see how the whole country can depend on tourism and how they are not dependent on other resources. That’s the way we want to transform Sierra Leone. We want Sierra Leone to be a hub and tourism to be the mainstay of the economy. That’s the reason we have come here,” said Minister Pratt.

She added that while her country lies on the Atlantic, they had wanted to experience tourism in a country in the Indian Ocean and further to see how we manage our tourism to sustain the government’s programmes.

She further added that Seychelles has given them a very good example of a country where the economy is solely dependent on tourism in terms of how the institutions, businesses, partnerships and the education programmes are organised, how does they impact on the rest of government with regard to various other sectors and how we have been able to tie them all and to build other platforms to look at tourism as the life and blood of the country.               

Speaking on bilateral cooperation, Minister Pratt said that with all the meetings happening with the local stakeholders, they have been able to forge ways for further engagement in digital meetings and further to opportunities of meeting up at international meetings and trade fairs, “which means that the collaboration is going to be strong and both countries will be able to make very strong representations at international meetings in terms of the fact that we’ll be able to share similar problems. So it’s a good way forward and we are going to stay in touch in order that we can look at areas of education, human resource capacity building and then also try to see how we can be able to solve some of these problems from the learning possibilities between the two countries,” Minister Pratt said. 

For his part, Minister Radegonde said that our country is ready and willing to share our tourism experience to help our small sister neighbour to diversify its economy for the benefit of its people who have been ravaged by years of civil war.

He added that with the Republic of Sierra Leone choosing our country for the tourism-based study sponsored by the World Bank shows that we have been doing something right which is being recognised.

Since arriving in the country on Monday, Minister Pratt and her delegation have, besides meeting with Minister Radegonde and principal secretary for Tourism Sherin Francis, met and held discussions with different tourism stakeholders in the public and private sector including visits to the port and education sector. They leave the country on Monday next week.  

The Republic of Sierra Leone is situated on the southwest coast of West Africa, bordered by Liberia to the southeast and Guinea in the north. It has a population of 7.2 million.

Patrick Joubert