Abstract:
The purpose of the study was to examine the role of tourism industry on the country development at Moshi Municipality. The study was guided by three specific objectives which included, to establish trends in a number of employment and incomes of various stakeholders as well foreign exchange resulting from tourism at Moshi Municipality, to analyze the linkages between tourism and other sectors of the economy in Moshi Municipality, to identify factors, which could help tour guides livelihood in Moshi Municipality to maximize economic gains from tourism and minimize economic losses from it. The study was conducted from Moshi Municipality. A total of 120 tour guides participated in this study, in additional to that 10 tour companies were selected for the research study. The research methodologies used in this study includes, interview, questionnaire and documentary review. The study found that tourism plays a great role in the contribution of economic growth of Moshi Municipality in term of income generation, employment creation, hotel sector growth and so forth. The level of employment/job opportunities resulting from tourism in Moshi Municipality though were there but did not satisfy majority of the people in the area, in the context that Tourism industry doesn’t brings job security to them, most of the people are not secured on their job. The results of the findings also showed that the level of increased foreign exchange earnings from tourism industry to tour guide was low in Moshi Municipality in sense that foreign exchange earnings did not often increase and earnings did not help households meets their financial emergencies. It can be said that the tourism industry did not help at high in poverty alleviation, since most of them did not show up much improving since it did not affect the life of the poor towards poverty alleviation and did not address the people income improvement. Regarding the linkage between tourism and other economic sectors, the study concludes that tourism sector is having connection to other sectors in the municipal by supporting them, like improving agricultural sectors, improving the hotel development as well as prompting export and import trade. The study further concludes that factors that would help improve tourism industry are needed, such as provision of education, tour guides serving ability, tour guides asset ownership as well as strong and effective government policy, this has an implication that they should be in place as indicated in the findings of the study. The researcher recommends that, Moshi Municipal should restructure the tourism industry in the region to ensure that the majority of the tour guide benefit from it. It should focus in view of alleviating poverty among tour guide and make the job secured to them.
