Abuja, Aug. 2, 2024 – The National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism (NIHOTOUR) has trained no fewer than 80,000 Nigerians under the leadership of Alhaji Nura Kangiwa in the last four years.
Joesef Karim, the Head, of its Research and Development Unit, who said this in Abuja, added that the institute had also empowered many Nigerians with skills and knowledge needed to succeed in the tourism industry.
NIHOTOUR was established in 1987 by the Federal Government to reduce the demand skills-gap in Nigeria’s hospitality and tourism sectors by providing hands-on trainings for personnel in the sector at basic, intermediate and advanced levels.
Karim said that the trainees were trained through the combined regular residential (on campus) and special intervention (off campus) training programmes of the institute between September 2020 and July 2024.
“In the past four years, these trainings have resulted in verifiable skilling, reskilling and upskilling of more than 50,000 entry level workers; and 10,000 middle and management level personnel in the sector.
“Within the same period of September 2020 to July 2024, NIHOTOUR championed and sustained tourism studies in Nigerian secondary schools across the country.
“Through this, more than 20,000 secondary students have been tutored and academically equipped for future tourism administration and operation in Nigeria, as a career path”.
Karim said that in spite of the paucity of fund and other limitations, NIHOTOUR had become the most visible and the leading tourism and hospitality agency of the Federal Government under Kangiwa as the institute’s director-general.
Karim said Kangiwa had established a formidable management team that transformed the obscure tourism training centre to an internationally recognised hospitality and tourism enterprise education citadel in West Africa.
He listed some of his other achievements to include the upgrade and expansion of the institute’s campuses from eight to 12 and the introduction of Gastronomy tourism studies and annual festival in Nigeria to facilitate cultural tourism.
Others, according to him, include innovation and implementation of Sustainable Tourism Entrepreneurship Program, popularly (STEP), a hospitality trades and tourism skills transfer programmes targeting rural host communities.
“Massive capacity development trainings of Nigeria’s tourism operators and practitioners including tour operators, travel agents, chefs and others in the value chain.
“Others include sustained tourism and hospitality train-the-trainer programmes for local instructors, acquisition of state-of-the-art mobile training kitchen trucks to facilitate hospitality crafts trainings in Nigeria’s hinterlands and underserved communities.
“Also, it includes facilitating legislation of tourism trainings and personnel regulations for best practices through the NIHOTOUR Establishment Act 2022,” he said.
Karim said that in spite the achievements, the major challenge of the institute was insufficient funding, as its capital budgetary allocation for the past four year was less than N500 million.
He explained that higher numbers of completed NIHOTOUR trainings and programmes in these past four years had been driven by Federal Government’s budgetary allocations.
This, according to him, is based on National Assembly members recommendations for their constituency projects to target fully funded rural host community hospitality craft and tourism skills development trainings.
Karim said that by the law, MDAs including NIHOTOUR, were only entitled to keep five per cent administrative charge of the appropriated constituency project for supervision of such constituency projects.
“It has been parts of these five per cent charges that NIHOTOUR deploys to execute specialised tourism and hospitality training programmes, provide various interventions and support for tourism private sector organisations,” he said
