The presentation of the EU funded project “Vrbas, Joint tourism development of the Vrbas valley“ is organised in Bugojno on Friday, December 19, 2008. Municipality of Bugojno, together with neighbour municipalities of Donji Vakuf and Gornji Vakuf-Uskoplje, Tourist Community of Central Bosnia Canton and Cantonal Institute for Urbanism, Spatial planning and Protection of Cultural-Historical Heritage are implementing the Project.

The Project “Vrbas, Joint tourism development of the Vrbas valley“, has been designed with the goal to contribute to social and economic development and at the same time to encourage sustainable development and environmental protection, mainly through promotion of tourism, based on cultural heritage and natural beauties. The goal of the Project is to ensure: establishment of joint tourism area of the Vrbas valley, preparation of new tourism products which will attract new tourists and encourage the current ones for a longer stay, identification and promotion of historical, cultural values and natural assets of the area and contribution to the tourism industry growth in order to become significant factor in economic development of the region.

Mayor of Bugojno Municipality, Mr. Hasan Ajkunić fully supported all partners involved in this Project implementation. „Significant attendance of project participants today in Bugojno is for sure a sign that we would successfully implement this Project, extremely important for entire Upper-Vrbas region.“, stressed Mr. Ajkunić.

During the presentation, the letter of support by European Commission Delegation to BiH was read. It was pointed out that tourism is connecting people and goes beyond any frontiers and enhances understanding among peoples and cultures.

The Director of the RED Agency, Ms. Amela Malićbegović noted that Bugojno Municipality could serve as a positive example to other municipalities how to efficiently use the European Union funds. „This project is excellent and I encourage you, because you have created good foundation for the tourism development. According to experts opinions, it is tourism that is best to invest in, due to most favourable ratio of invested funds and revenue.“, highlighted Ms. Malićbegović.

Ms. Dženana Alajbegović, project manager of Bugojno Municipality thanked to European Commission for the opportunity to improve the situation in the tourism by implementing this project, and also an opportunity to develop own capacities. She said how this project implementation should result in several positive outcomes. „Increase of GDP, new jobs and decrease of unemployment, development of new tourist products, large number of young tourist guides and other tourism workers educated, are only some of the expected positive results of this Project, she said.

It is envisaged that during the Project a comprehensive analysis of the current tourism situation would be prepared, as well as trainings and seminars for future tour guides and trainings for farmers based on farm tourism activities to be held. Furthermore, during the Project new tourism products would be developed, heritage objects and events digitalised, rest areas built, greetings and information boards placed, promotional material prepared and distributed, and dynamic web portal multilingual applications developed too.

Total value of the Project is 626.084,65KM (320,112EUR) of which the European Union allocated 532.171,95KM (272,095.19EUR) or 85% of the total project funds.