Ethiopia is moving ahead to adopt a national tourism satellite account to calculate the contribution of the tourism industry to the national economy.

Expected to be operational in a half year, the new system will be launched in collaboration with Tourism Ethiopia and the Ministry of Innovation & Technology. Developed by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the system is a standard statistical framework used as a tool for the economic measurement of tourism.

The system will enable the country to measure the size of the tourism industry, which is the combination of accommodation, food and beverage services, transportation and travel agencies in the national accounts.

It will replace a system of estimation based on outdated analysis and surveys that have been used for years, according to Woldegebreal Berhe, marketing team leader at Tourism Ethiopia.

The county has been calculating tourism revenue and its contribution to the GDP based on an assessment conducted by the World Bank and the Ministry of Culture & Tourism in 2013. The assessment states that on average a tourist stays in the county for 16 days, spending 234 dollars a day. And the revenue has been calculated by multiplying the total number of tourists who arrived in the country by those values.

"This is not acceptable as many other countries don't use this system," said Wubshet Kassa, economic services planning director at the National Planning & Development Commission.

Last year, UNWTO and the Ministry of Culture reported different figures on tourist flows to Ethiopia and the size of revenue generated from the industry. The Ministry recorded 3.3 billion dollars was made from 934,000 visitors, while UNWTO reported that 933,000 visitors generated 2.5 billion dollars in 2017.

"The satellite account will help the country capture and release accurate information about the industry," said Lensa Mekonen, CEO of Tourism Ethiopia.