Socio-Economic Impacts of Tourism in Axum Town, Tigray Regional State, Ethiopia

This research paper tries to assess the multi-dimensional impacts of tourism in Axum which increases from time to time as the tourist flow increases, identifying problems which hindered the tourism environment and examining the magnitude of the multi-dimensional linkages between tourism and the local community. The main objective of the study is to understand the socio-economic impact of tourism. To achieve the objective, the researcher designed a proper methodology which includes both primary and secondary data. The primary data were collected through questionnaires, key informant interview (KII), focus group discussion (FGD), and observations from 208 total respondents. To support the primary data, secondary data were also collected and were all analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. As the finding indicates, tourism has a multi-dimensional impact, economically, socio-culturally, environmentally as well as politically. For instance, the positive contributions of tourism are: source of employment for 2,389 people and the number of employed workers in business household heads (HHs) also increases by 11% every year, similarly the income of business HHs also increases by 8.8% every year as the tourist flow increases. Similar to economic impact, the sector has also socio-cultural, environmental, and political importance such as infrastructural improvement, preservation of attractions, creating environmental awareness, and encouraging power and librating effect of women which are few among the positive impacts. On the contrary, the sector has also negative impacts in terms of motivating begging and dependence, seasonal unemployment and unstable income, aggravating prostitution and student dropout, loss of cultural identity, environmental and heritage degradation and taking of intelligence, which are few among the negative one but the positive impact of tourism outweighs the negative one. Even though the sector has its own contribution in the town in a multi-dimensional way, the town cannot gain from the sector as its potential of attraction endowment due to poor infrastructure and accommodation provision, social-related problems such as begging, theft and high entrance fee of attractions, inadequacy in quality and quantity service pervasion, lack of awareness and promotional works, lack of coordination as well as geographical location which are among the few factors for the underdevelopment of the sector in the town. Finally, this paper recommended that participation and coordination of all concerned bodies and stakeholders should be very imperative in supporting and expansion of infrastructures which helps to increase tourist flow and income earned from it and its consequences to socio-economic benefits by giving higher attention to minimizing the negative impacts.

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