By Yunus S Saliu
In quest to restore sanity into some untidy areas across the Tourism Development Areas the Gambia Tourism Board already embarks on beautification of the tourism development area.
Abdoulie Hydara, Director General of Gambia Tourism Bord (GTBoard) said the tourism development area will replace all the scattered around billboards in the TDA with standard and digital billboards.
According to him in electronic billboards there will be multiple stakeholders on same platform and each stakeholder will have time frame allocated to their product and information to avoid scattered billboards in the areas.
At TDA, he said the area is untidy as lots of billboards are scattered around “from the traffic light to turntable there are lots of grasses and proliferation of billboards, parked cars all over the places.” So, he added “we want to bring sanity back and to do that there will be some demolition of things in sight to allow the rearrange of the proliferation billboards.”
This will give more view to traffic and as well beautify the tourism development areas and “we are starting this from Berthill Harding Highways,” he disclosed in an interview.
The beautification of the TDA starting with Berthill Harding Highways according to him “has nothing to with the road expansion project, though whatever that is happening within the corridor of the TDA we’ll have some other stakeholders involve.”
For a successful work and standard digital billboards in TDA, he said GTBoard will engage relevant authorities and stakeholders such as National Road Authority (NRA), OIC Secretariat even NEA among others.
Currently, he said, the custodian of billboards in the country is the NRA but now set to bring standard billboard to bring sanity “though the present billboards are serving the purpose of being there as a billboard to the owners.” But, to the TDA it is not well arrange “as they are sometimes having negative effect that need to eradicate and looking into the roads expansion, and the beautification among other things.”
“This beautification started already with clearing of the grasses and some garbage on the highway and it is going to bring a complete value chain in term of beauty that we envisaged to do, which is not only flowers, benches, walkway or bicycle way,” he explained further.
Since there is developed concept already, he said beautification of the TDA starting from Berthill Harding Highway will go with tar road, picnic benches so that people on leisure or doing walking exercise can have place to sit and relax.
