Tourism sector has been a long time bed rock of in Kenya and especially in the coastal region.
The sector has been the pivot point of most local residents living in towns of coast including Mombasa and Malindi, where a bigger percentage of residents are employed in some of the big star hotels and villas in the two major towns.
Malindi is one of the beautifully town where it was once called ‘small Italy’ due to the frequent and huge number of visitors from Italy, has now become a dormant town with few tourists who have now become familiar to the towns streets loitering around.
In a rear experience the town business sector has totally gone down to its knee levels, shops that used to be running 24/7 hours are now closed by 5pm and opening hours becoming a choice of an individual some preferring to open by late 8am.
Tourism players in Malindi they revealed shocking information of what made town dormant.
Cosmas Kyalo the chairman for Malindi Handcraft Association said that the sector has drastically gone down from 100% to around 10% number of tourists visiting their cite currently.
“We have been suffering for the last 5 years, we used to register a total of 300 visitors daily who used to visit our show room, look at the different kinds of crafts design and buy them in large quantity,” said Kyalo.
“Currently the number of visitors coming to our site is disappointing, as from March this year we have not received a single tourist live alone the domestic tourists,” he added.
According to Kyalo the Handcraft site has been of good help to the community and the county of Kilifi at large, adding that they used to sponsor children with bursary funds and also creating jobs opportunity to more than 1500 youths.
Mr Kyalo further said in the last 10 years when tourism sector was stable they used to sell craft property of more than Sh1 million daily, prior to what they are now getting.
“We really dream of those days that we could earn like we were working for a multibillion company, yet we were just working under trees to sustain our lives, but we earned a lot those days,” he laughed.
Joshua Kimumu who is one of the members of Malindi Handraft said that he has been working under the Umbrella for over 30 years as a Handcraft Designer and tourism has been his pillar of success.
“Tourism has been feeding me, and through it I was able to support my family, the fall of it in this town has been a big blow to us,” said Kimumu.
“We are now sometimes forced to over work others take too long to reach out to their families and wives due to the insufficient funds that is currently being experienced, our wives are complaining over the lack of conjugal rights in the house,” he said.