The Rwanda National Office of Tourism (ORTPN) Tuesday at Hotel Novotel held its Annual Research Day on the conservation of national parks and forests. The annual event brings together researchers from different organisations that conducted research on how tourist attractions could be best conserved. According to ORTPN Director of Research and Monitoring, Francois Bizimungu, the research day has been held for the past 5 years. He said that it helps the tourism office with ways of tackling the problem of poachers and other natural hazards that threaten tourist attractions. “Their research helps us in our day to day efforts of conserving national parks and forests. We help them conduct their case studies but we don’t support them financially. We have only financially supported one student in her research,” Bizimungu explained. “These researchers go down to people staying near the parks and forests. So the information out of their research helps us in finding solutions to these problems. It also helps to find a way of educating these people on the importance of conserving these tourist attractions,” he added. Pascal Museminali, the Manager of Volcano National Park (VNP), one of the people who carried out a key study on the conservation of national parks, said that from his research, he found out the parks’ passive importance to the people living around them. “I have learnt how to handle myself as a manager and how I am going to be dealing with the problems we face in our daily work because these parks can generate income for them and they bring revenue to the country,” he observed. Ends
