dc.description.abstract |
The purpose of this research was to assess the potentials, opportunities and challenges of
health tourism development based on traditional medicines in Bahir Dar city, Amhara,
Ethiopia. The study applied a descriptive research design with a mixed research
approach. The target populations were traditional medicine practitioners, tour guide
association experts, culture and tourism experts, health experts, academicians, Ethiopian
Food and Drug Authority experts, and biodiversity and environmental conservation
experts. From those target populations, a total of 75 respondents from which 73 were
valid for the analysis and 18 key informants for interviews were taken by using census
and purposive sampling techniques, respectively. Both primary data sources, such as
interviews, questionnaires, observation and secondary data sources, such as books,
articles, journals, and reports, were used to accomplish the study. The results of the study
revealed that traditional medicines have high authenticity, healing ability, nature-based
origin, and plurality potentials for health tourism development. The study also proved the
availability of suitable environment, suitable location, supportive institutions, and tourist
attractions and offerings as supportive opportunities. Lastly, the results confirmed that
there is a very high challenge of adequate infrastructure as well as high challenge of
collaboration, poor product development, adequate marketing and promotion, welldeveloped
human resources, bad image that hinder traditional medicine-based health
tourism development. Based on the results of the study, it is recommended that
stakeholders in this sector should strive to exploit high authenticity, plurality, healing
ability, and nature-based origin potentials of traditional medicines along with highly
available abundance opportunities by solving very high infrastructural and high
institutional collaboration, human resource, marketing, product development, and bad
image challenges to develop traditional medicine-based health tourism in Bahir Dar city. |
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