Abstract:
The study was conducted to assess the Challenges and opportunities of tourism development in
wonchi district oromia regional state Ethiopia. For achieving the objective of the study, both
primary and secondary data were generated by employing qualitative and quantitative methods.
Purposive and stratified simple random sampling techniques were used to select 4 tourism sites
and 141 sample households out of 1503 total households. The quantitative data was analyzed
using frequency and percentage used by SPSS V.20 and Microsoft-excel appropriately while
qualitative data were includes questionnaire focus group, discussion, key information and field
observation was used to triangulate and authenticate the study. A natural, historical and socio cultural tourism attraction in the study area was studied. On the other hand, the study also
identified several factors, which suggest the need for improvement and strong effort. Such as,
Poor Institutional Arrangements, Econ Challenges, Legal Challenge, Social Challenges,
Environmental challenges , Political challenges were identified as a main challenges for
tourism development in the study area. Besides of these several opportunities like, Economic,
Social and Environmental opportunities were identified as success factors for tourism
development in the study area. Likewise, tourism development strategies in the study area were
studied which suggest the improvements and achieve sustainable tourism development plan were
made in both top to down and down to top approach strategy were discussed. Results,
Discussion and recommendations of the study explore ways to improve and enhance the capacity
of local government, NGOs and other stakeholders to achieve tourism development in the study
area.
