Pro-poor tourism: A poverty reduction strategy

While responsible ecotourism and other sustainable
tourism strategies may bring significant socio-economic
benefits to host communities, they are not necessarily
aimed at poverty alleviation. Given that the United
Nations Millennium Declaration19 has placed poverty at
the centre of the international development agenda, it can
be argued that sustainable tourism development should
go beyond the promotion of broad socio-economic development
and give greater priority to poverty reduction.
This priority shift would also address a somewhat
ignored recommendation of the seventh session of the
Commission on Sustainable Development which, inter
alia, urged Governments “to maximize the potential of
tourism for eradicating poverty by developing appropriate
strategies in cooperation with all major groups, and
indigenous and local communities” (see UN, 1999c).
A pro-poor tourism (PPT) approach differs from
ecotourism and other sustainable tourism strategies in
that its overriding goal is to deliver net benefits to the
poor.
While PPT and ecotourism may have some similar
objectives, the key difference is that poverty reduction
is the core focus of the PPT approach, rather than a
secondary component of a mainly environmental sustainability
strategy. In other words, although environmental
protection remains an important PPT goal, the quality of
the environment in which targeted poor groups live is
only one part of a broader poverty reduction strategy.
There are several reasons why tourism development
could be a particularly effective tool of poverty
reduction. First, as discussed earlier, tourism offers considerable
employment opportunities for unskilled labour,
rural to urban migrants and lower-income women.
Second, there are considerable linkages with the informal
sector, which could generate positive multiplier effects to
poorer groups that rely on that sector for their liveli-
8 DESA Discussion Paper No. 29
hoods. Third, tourism tends to be heavily based upon the
preservation of natural capital—such as, wildlife and
scenery—and cultural heritage, which are often “assets
that some of the poor have, even if they have no financial
resources” (Ashley et al., 2001:2).
It is increasingly realized that promoting greater
community participation in tourism development not
only provides stronger incentives to conserve natural
capital,21 but can also lead to a more equitable sharing of
benefits and thus greater opportunities for poverty alleviation.
But while ecotourism and PPT both aim to increase
community participation in general, PPT also goes
beyond this goal in that it includes specific mechanisms
to enhance the participation of and opportunities for the
poorer segments of society. Three key components of the
PPT approach are:
(a) improved access to the economic benefits of
tourism by expanding employment and business
opportunities for the poor and providing adequate
training to enable them to maximize these opportunities;
(b) measures to deal with the social and environmental
impact of tourism development, particularly
the above-mentioned forms of social exploitation,
as well as excessive pressure on natural
resources, pollution generation and damage to
ecosystems; and
(c) policy reform, by enhancing participation of the
poor in planning, development and management of
tourism activities pertinent to them, removing some
of the barriers for greater participation by the poor,
and encouraging partnerships between government
agencies or the private sector and poor people in
developing new tourism goods and services.
Some of these PPT concepts are beginning to be
implemented in several developing countries, such as
Ecuador, Namibia, Nepal and Uganda. In Namibia, for
example, the implementation of a PPT approach to the
development and management of the country’s community-
based tourism segment appears to have made a significant
contribution towards poverty reduction.
Several studies have shown that financial returns
from community-based natural resource management and
tourism ventures in Namibia usually exceed their investments
and are thus a viable option for generating sustainable
economic returns, while promoting environmental
conservation and cultural traditions in rural areas (see,
for example, Barnes et al., 2002). There is now evidence
of a successful introduction of the PPT approach by the
Namibia Community-based Tourism Association
(Nacobta), a non-profit organization that supports poor
local communities—including small entrepreneurs with
inadequate skills or access to financial resources—in
their efforts to develop tourism enterprises in the country
(see Nicanor, 2001).
Nacobta supports its members at both micro and
macro levels, mainly through the provision of grants,
loans, training, capacity building in the areas of institutional
development and marketing training, as well as in
negotiations with relevant government agencies and the
mainstream tourist industry. Nacobta is explicitly propoor
not only because it represents the poorest segment
of the country’s tourism industry, but also because most
of its members live on communal land areas, where the
majority of the inhabitants have an average per capita
income of less than US$1 a dayand depend on subsistence
agriculture. One of the main objectives of Nacobta
is “to raise the income and employment levels of these
areas through tourism, in order to improve the living
standards of people in communal areas” (Nicanor,
2001:5).
The pro-poor tourism approach of Nacobta is thus
different from conventional tourism because members of
local communities both own and manage the tourism
enterprises, whose economic benefits flow directly into
community funds or as formal sector wages, temporary
remuneration to casual labourers and income to informal
sector traders. There is also evidence that the financial
returns from most community-based tourism enterprises
supported by Nacobta “has changed their communities
from being poor or very poor to being better off”
(Nicanor, 2001:5).