Valuation of Awash National Park, Ethiopia: An Application of Travel Cost and Choice Experiment Methods

Ethiopia has more than 55 protected areas that have endemic wildlife species. Of the protected areas, 21 of them are national parks. This makes the country to have natural ecosystems and wildlife heritage with huge potential to attract tourists. Nevertheless, the contribution of the tourism sector to the national economy is far below its potential. Awash National Park is one of nature-based recreational sites in Ethiopia for its impressive landscape and diversity of fauna. However, the Park has been unable to improve the qualities of ecotourism experience and expand the types and variety of its recreational services because of lack of sustainable income from internal sources. The value of the Park in terms of its recreational service to the society is not known. The valuation of the Park is important so as to inform the site managers extract internal revenues that help them improve the qualities of the national park and expand the types and variety of the services. To assess the on-site recreational benefit of the Park, the study adopted a quantitative research approach with a cross-sectional survey design in which primary data were collected from a sample of 195 on-site visitors of the Park. The valuation of the Park was done by adopting the travel cost and choice experiment methods. The Travel Cost Method of valuation revealed that the aggregate annual recreational economic benefit generated by visitors to the site is ETB 4,987,965.14. Of which, the site authority captured only about 12.1% of the true economic recreational benefit of the site. On the other hand, the results of the Choice Experiment Method of valuation revealed that all the attributes (namely, wildlife population, afforestation and additional service to visitors and a monetary attribute, i.e, the gate fee) significantly affected the probability of choosing an improvement scenario. The results of this study indicated that the economic value of recreation benefit from Awash national park is very big, even under conservative estimates. It also indicated that the domestic recreation demand to the Park is high. Therefore, it is suggested that the major problems that reduce the quality of the site should be alleviated and improvement and expansion projects of the Park should be designed and implemented.