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# re: 2007 - a turning point for pro-poor tourism @ Saturday, December 23, 2006 3:00 PM

Torism brings oppertunities for the local communities espatially in remote and distant areas by various means.  I am sharing an experience of mine to show that besides social interactionand economic activity for local how it often make poor creative.

It was in mountenous regions of Northern pakistan where a tourist was shooting some mountain scenes.  there came a person whose wife was in hospital and he was in dire need of money.  Man went to the tourist and told him Sir you will have to pay tex for each snap you are shooting and the tourist paid 10 Rs per photo to the person who bought medicines for wife from that.   After some time he went agin to the tourist and apologised that it was his need whcih made him do so and offered him his services to help the tourist to compansate for thst money he got from him.  The man helped the tourist for a day as guide worth that money.

It is a samll example but it shows that how the resource poor regions leave the people with out money at times and tourism in such areas helps such people to get some money in circulation among the communities to meet their needs.  espacially in mountains when in harvest season every ones has stock of neccesary food for year, there is no trade and monetry exchange.  As every one works in field there is no need of waged labour.  Money comes to their hands when only thier crops are marketed.  Before this if one needs money tourism helps them to make some mony either by hosting tourists with ameal or by guiding them on tracks or by portering the heavy loads or  by renting their animals for the hard expedition tracks. another way where tourism helps local communities by having entry fee to a conserved area where this money comes in local people support.  Apart from individual support there are many examples when tourists help indignous communites in establishing new schools, conservation schemes, environment support programs and other development projects by having some initial funding and by involving locals.  such efforts are also a contribution to link indignous cutt off communities with rest of the world.

Propoor teourism helps local disadvantages communties at times in a very critical way.  

sabah

# re: 2007 - a turning point for pro-poor tourism @ Friday, January 12, 2007 12:19 AM

sir,i am dauda danjuma a nigerian,living at portharcourt.rivers state.reading your above makes me wonder what we could do with our national park?Gashaka Gumti.Could this park ever become what oil is to us in real terms of '"pro-poor tourism"?

dauda danjuma

# re: 2007 - a turning point for pro-poor tourism @ Tuesday, January 23, 2007 9:25 PM

I have just come back from consulting for EURAid in Sharm, preparing a training strategy to promote sustainable development, part of a larger project including marketing, product development, infrastructure, protected area management... The FTO guidelines are very needed indeed, but more than that we need the public sector officials to turn up. There are 55 hotels going up in the next three years in Sharm alone. Room prices have dropped for the last 10 years to an all time low (although still slightly higher than in Hurghada). The Tourism Development Agency is in fact a large estate agent, without an understanding of integrated coastal area development, and investors are too powerful and also too short term in their thinking. It is at the time of making the financial investment of building a hotel that we need to think of environmental impacts and social as well (did you know that the government is not allowing South Sinai to become populated, and instead promotes short term work in hotels whereby you work 21 days for 14 hours and then you get a week to go back to Cairo/Alexandria/Nile valley to bring money to your family?). It is important that FTO and others bring in these standards, but more important even that a coalition of international tour operators sits down with the public sector officials and speaks about carrying capacities and models of sustainable development.

Xavier Font

2007 - a turning point for pro-poor tourism

Thursday, December 14, 2006 11:00 AM by Jon Mitchell

In mid-2006, The Federation of Tour Operators (FTO) – the association that represents most of the UK’s largest outbound tour operators – produced guidelines for sustainable suppliers to the tourism sector. These guidelines aim to reduce their adverse environmental impact and improve their local social and economic impact.

From 4th to 11th December, I was invited to join an FTO pilot project in Egypt, aiming to promote these guidelines to FTO suppliers in Sharm-El-Sheikh and Hurghada on the Red Sea and Luxor on the River Nile. My trip was part-funded by the Travel Foundation, a charity aiming to enhance the impact of tourism on destinations, funded by tourist and corporate donations.

I was impressed by the tremendously strong and positive local response to this initiative, with between 70 and 120 private sector suppliers involved in each of the three events held; mainly hoteliers but also excursion service providers (i.e. dive centres) and local agents (ground handlers). On the other hand, the response from the public sector was disappointing. Even though the guidelines align closely with government policy priorities and tourism in Egypt employs 2.7m and represents 27% of national exports, invited representatives from the public sector stayed away in droves.

Each event consisted of a morning plenary session about the FTO Guidelines, the Travel Foundation, and practical steps that could improve suppliers’ environmental and socio-economic performance at the destination. The afternoon comprised a series of smaller, interactive workshops exploring in more detail how to implement positive change. These workshops made it clear that the interest in enhancing the environmental and socio-economic impact of tourism at the destination is not matched with knowledge about the practical steps to achieve this impact:
  • Suppliers are very interested in learning from real examples of how, for instance, hotels elsewhere had reduced energy consumption or developed local agricultural supply networks. This reflects a particular interest in environmental measures – in part because these promise to enhance the impact of tourism while simultaneously making financial savings and also because the sector is more familiar with environmental initiatives than social or economic ones.
  • On the socio-economic front, the initiative illustrated the power of implementing change along a buyer-driven value chain, as the powerful purchasers of tourist services in the form of international tour operators recommend changes in operating practice to their suppliers in the destinations.

It seems to me that the FTO guidelines could reflect that some kind of ‘tipping point’ is underway in consumer attitudes to a range of environmental and social issues in the source markets. Even a year ago, it would have been unthinkable for the FTO – a trade association representing an industry with a short-term interest in negotiating the cheapest possible rates from suppliers – to identify ‘best practice’ such as this (the recognition of trade unions by employers in the tourist sector and paying tourist staff packages that exceed the statutory minimum conditions).

So, we may be seeing a hitherto unknown coalescing of interests in developing tourism in a way that counts for local communities and the poor in particular. There is obviously a need for research into practical ways to do this (the ODI Tourism Programme’s recent toolkit, How can governments boost the local economic impacts of tourism?, offers this for government policy-makers) but the low public-sector turnout in Egypt suggests that the focus must include the key private sector actors, especially tour operators, to be effective. A focus on value chains for tourism provides an important, and exciting, new focus to ODI’s Tourism Programme. It is a focus which we will be making a lot more of – with Briefing Papers, Opinions, public meetings to come. 2007 will definitely be an important year for the ODI’s work on Tourism – could it also be a defining year for that most global of industries?
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