Goge Africa, has commenced a free training programme in tourism in Lagos State to empower Nigerian youths.
The training, which spans June 1 and 4 is in collaboration with Lagos State government, Sterling Bank, National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism (NIHOTOUR) and Nigeria Railway Corporation (NRC). According to the Managing Director of Goge Africa, Mrs. Nneka Isaac – Moses: ‘‘This initiative is in line with our mission to build capacity for 1, 000 tourism practitioners by 2025. The tourism industry worldwide is in need of reinvigoration following new travel regulations necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, there is no better time to upscale human capacity in line with global best practice in the tourism industry worldwide than now.
‘‘The Goge Africa tourism training is designed to support capacity building in the tourism and hospitality industry to restore the confidence of the travel community. This will facilitate the revitalisation of the industry for financial viability.
‘‘In consideration of the economic downturn resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided to provide some of our training to industry practitioners and new entrants at no financial cost. Through this training, we intend to develop tourism entrepreneurs with the requisite skills necessary for driving the promotion of domestic tourism in Nigeria and Africa.’’
The training programme is an offshoot of the series of interventions which the outfit launched last year. ‘‘Our first intervention was an online five episode series, captioned: ‘Cross Sectoral Collaboration for Tourism and Economic Development.’ held in 2020,’’ disclosed the MD. The course content entails: Ecotourism and Sustainable tourism; Tour packaging; Characteristics of a Successful Tour Guide; Social Media and Tour marketing; Marketing and Sales of Tourism products for Beginners; Introduction to taxation for Entrepreneurs; Financial Literacy; and Scaling Tourism Business in a Pandemic.