Dr. Mordecai Ogada Director of Conservation Solutions Afrika
Wednesday, April 1st 2015 1:30pm
Lory Student Center Room 304-306
The forces of globalization have shortened virtual and cultural distances around the world in the last two decades. This in turn has exponentially increased the potential of tourism to exert its power on economies, environment and most importantly on cultures and the way people think. Postgraduate students of tourism management are therefore training to be leaders in very fluid and powerful field. Using the Kenyan and wider African experience as examples, Dr. Oganda’s talk will explore why much of the tourism industry on which we depend so heavily is not impacting our societies in the way and the degree that it should.
Dr. Ogada will explore the origins of ‘tourist thinking’ in Africa and it’s ambivalent, if not exploitative relationship with local African communities. This will include issues around the provision of employment to local communities and the inherent weakness of the human dimensions in the current model. He will also look at the need for human interactions and the role of managers in mitigating the potentially harmful interactions that occur between tourists and locals. This will highlight the transformative roles that students in tourism, human dimensions, and other natural resource related fields need to embrace in order to make tourism socially, environmentally, and culturally sustainable in a rapidly changing world.
