Gulu District Commercial Officer, Kenneth Oketta the chairman of the organizing committee of World Tourism Day celebrations in Gulu in 2019 is calling for Acholi investors to take advantage of festivities to mark the highly acclaimed celebrations.
GULU-UGANDA: Despite being home to the largest national park in Uganda, Murchison Falls National Park sub region has never hosted World Tourism Day national celebrations.
The long awaited opportunity to show case Acholi Tourism has presented itself this year when Gulu has the northern Uganda slot, beating Lira and Arua who also bidded to host the event, slated for September 27th according to Kenneth Oketta the Gulu District Commercial Officer.
At the fore front of organizing the highly billed event is the Ministry of Tourism,Uganda Tourism Board the marketing arm Ugandan tourism and Wildlife Education Centre based at Entebbe who are scheduled to exhibit wildlife at the event.
The event venue where wildlife will be exhibited, which was planned to be Pece Stadium is subject to change as this venue is also the host venue for the East African under 20 football tournament group A games.
“We had planned to host these world tourism activities at Pece Stadium but there is a big football tournament which will happened at the same venue.Stadiums are built for sports so we will have to move either to the SOS or Kaunda grounds”,Oketta said
Stonewall Kato the chairman of Acholi Tourism Association one of the 12 regional tourism clusters affiliated to Uganda Tourism Board said at press briefing today said this event comes with huge opportunity for Acholi to market itself to the world.
“Acholi has the riches in the world in terms of cuisines numbering 200 only rivaled by India with 159 yet India is a highly populated country and Acholi is just a Ugandan tribe,”Kato said
Kato added that work of documenting all Acholi tourism sites is going on for purposes of making an Acholi tourism directory to market the northern Uganda potential tourism hub.
Oketta said about one thousand trees are expected to be planted in Gulu along Pece stream as part of activities to mark this historical landmark event.
Bernard Obwoyo enumerated potential Acholi tourism sites worth developing Guru-guru cave,Amuru hot spings, Fort Patiko, Aruu Falls among other sites to be developed.
