Tour guides are ignorant about indigenous names of wildlife in the different game parks and wildlife education centre.
Animals in the game parks across the country are labelled in both the indigenous and English language. However, most of the labels for animals are spelt wrong. The indigenous animals are written in the Ugandan local dialect.
Meeting members of the Parliament’s Committee on Finance at the Uganda Wildlife Education Center (UWEC) in Entebbe on Friday Morning, the chairperson UWEC Flavia Kabahenda said that one of the setbacks in the tourism industry is the lack of enough knowledge by tour guides at the different tourist attraction sites to easily tell stories and names of the wildlife in the local dialect.
Kabahenda, says that they plan to train the tour guides to understand the names of the animals in the local languages.
UWEC is managed under the Uganda Wildlife Authority. It is mandated to educate and preserve wildlife and culture in the country. Currently, the Wildlife education centre manages up to 80 animals and several plant species.
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James Musinguzi, the UWEC Executive Director, says that the receives close to 110,000 foreign visitors every year. He, however, decried the limited government financing which leaves UWEC to do resource mobilization by itself.
The centre only receives 650 million shillings every financial year from the government, which is below the required 4 billion shillings required to run the facility.
Kabahenda also highlighted the need for subjects of the different cultural institutions to visit the Education Centers so as to know more about their totems.
– URN
