opportunities that can be created through tourism for the poor, the theory means little in terms of reducing poverty unless it is possible for the poor to access these opportunities. Instrumental to the creation of opportunities is the necessity for the implementation of a range of measures ranging from focusing on the poor in macro-policy to raising the knowledge and skills capacity of the poor to work in the tourism industry or to develop their entrepreneurial skills. Careful consid-eration also needs to be given to how to create opportunities for the poor in the tourism supply chain, including industries in which they are traditionally employed, e.g. agriculture and fi shing. Alongside offering a means to help coun-tries to meet a reduction in poverty as one of the MDGs, tourism may also play an important role in the creation of opportunities for women, perhaps for the fi rst time. Not only is this important for the individuals but also wider policy objec-tives to empower women and give them a larger voice in the running of societies.
(2006a), asking its member states to present case studies of projects, businesses or other tourism activities that had effectively contributed to poverty reduction.
An eclectic range of projects were included that were deemed to be representative of how tourism could make an active contribution to poverty reduction. These included: rural and agro-tourism programmes; community-based hotels, restau-rants and eco-lodges; tourism micro-entrepreneur networks; village tourism;
community-owned tour operators; natural parks or protected areas; guide training programmes; regional development based on tourism; and handicraft develop-ment programmes.
The limited amount of available data and retained activity in the fi eld of tourism and poverty reduction is refl ected in only a total of 26 projects from 20 different countries being included in the report, 17 of which had commenced their activities in 2000 or later. It is also evident from the selection of projects that there is not necessarily an evident cohesion of project types, although the majority are skewed towards alternative types of tourism development including rural, village and community-based programmes. The scale of operation is also varied, from a focus on an individual enterprise to regional development. An evident absence is the identifi cation of projects that involve the mainstream tourism industry, the process of ‘tilting’ the industry to meet the needs of the poor that characterises PPT.
The small scale of the projects that characterise much of the tourism and poverty initiatives has drawn criticism of their limited impact on the poverty reduction agenda. In reference to the UNWTO ST-EP programme, whilst recognising the importance of its establishment, Goodwin (2009) observes that it remains a programme with small-scale schemes that have not engaged with the tourism industry. Based upon the 26 case studies presented in the UNWTO (2006a) report, it is not easy to characterise the direct employment generated through the schemes, as the character of employment varies from one project to another and is affected by seasonality. The poor were typically employed in guiding services, catering, reception of tourists, entertainment, waiter services, cleaning, sale of products, handicraft production and in a few cases for administra-tion and management purposes. Emphasising the need for participatory research with the poor to gain a clear understanding of how tourism should be developed to provide positive impacts, it was found in many cases that whilst training and capacity building is needed for many of these positions, tourism employment and the jobs themselves were often interpreted as part-time activities for the families involved, as they have to deal with other obligations, notably the growing of food.
The importance of the supply chain in generating secondary and dynamic effects from tourism on poverty reduction was emphasised in the last section of this
chapter. In the review of the selected projects, the UNWTO (2006a) found that two main problems were experienced in strengthening the supply chain through the use of local suppliers to reduce economic leakages. The issue of a lack of quality and an ability of local suppliers to meet tourist expectations was overcome by some of the tourism businesses setting up training programmes for the local suppliers to help them understand the demands of hotel businesses and tourists.
The second problem related to the capacity of local enterprises to ensure a regular supply of produce, a problem which requires an increase in technical capacity and some degree of investment to overcome.
Despite the lack of evidence of engagement of the mainstream tourism industry in poverty reduction, the United Kingdom tourism industry has been instrumental in establishing the charitable organisation of the Travel Foundation, whose aim is to improve the livelihoods of peoples working in developing countries. An example of one of their projects is described in Box 5.4 , which demonstrates how participatory approaches to gain a richer understanding of the problems faced by the poor combined with the establishments of partnerships, in this case the local community with the Kenyan Association of Tour Operators (KATO), can improve the economic benefi ts of tourism for the poor.
BOX 5.4 DEVELOPING AND MARKETING A SUSTAINABLE MAASAI VILLAGE TOURISM EXPERIENCE IN KENYA
Whilst examples of the private sector taking a leading role in the use of tourism for poverty reduction are sparse, one initiative is the crea-tion of the Travel Foundacrea-tion in the United Kingdom, a charity that works closely with the tourism industry to make tourism more sustain-able and enhance the livelihoods of the poor through running destina-tion projects. One of these projects was the ‘Kipas Maasai Village Tourism Experience’ located in the Mara Triangle of the Maasai Mara game reserve in Kenya, where the aim was to transfer the tourism product into a sustainable model for tourism. The ‘Experience’ is based on the visitation of tourists to fi ve villages located within the area to learn about the Maasai culture. The trips were organised by tour operators to the villages and the tourists were transported by driver guides. The Travel Foundation scheme had four key objectives related to: an enrichment of livelihood opportunities for the Maasai;
an increased authenticity of cultural exchanges between the village people and tourists; the provision of outbound and destination
tourism operators with a sustainable cultural tourism excursion to offer their clients; and to disseminate lessons of good practice learnt from this scheme to other community tourism ventures to improve the sustainability of their businesses.
After exploratory meetings with the villagers it was found that the economic benefi ts from tourism actually reaching them was minimal, as the driver guides who were taking tourists to the villages were taking 96 per cent of the visitor entry fees. The way this issue was overcome was with the joint support of a partnership of the Kenya Association of Tour Operators (KATO) and United Kingdom outbound tour operators, and the facilitation of dialogues between the tour operators and the local community. Discussions with driver guide representatives also took place, as there was high level of hostility to any changes in the arrange-ments of the excursions that would fi nancially disadvantage them. This hostility was overcome through the support of the tour operators and the travel industry at large, the action and threats of media exposure of the driver guides’ actions in taking such a high percentage of the tourist entry fees, and the disciplining of disruptive guides by their employers.
The drivers were also awarded 10 per cent commission on the sales of tickets for the village excursion and tours through KATO.
The successes of the scheme have resulted in better governance and management of the tours, with a vast increase in economic benefi ts for the local people of the villages. Received fees from the entry permits by the villagers have increased by 800 per cent and a transparent payment system for the collection of visitor fees has been implemented. The scheme also emphasises the value of partic-ipatory mechanisms and dialogue to bring stakeholders together – for example, between the local community and destination tour operators – and to help in enhancing the understandings by other stakeholders of the experiences and problems that are faced by the villagers, including marginalisation and exclusion from the industry and decision-making. A further positive outcome has been that visitor satisfaction has increased with the tours, which bodes well for the continuing use of the villages by tour operators.
Source: after The Travel Foundation, 2012
In an attempt to embrace the tourism industry into a wider network, one strategic initiative that has been taken at a national level is the development of a Fair Trade programme for tourism in South Africa. The concept of Fair Trade arose from the concerns over the imbalances in world trade within the free trade
framework that had led to the accumulation of the staggering levels of debt by LDCs, causing the well-publicised mass protests at the WTO (World Trade Organisation) ministerial conferences in Seattle in 1999, Prague in 2000, and the G8 summits in Genoa in 2001 and Cancún in 2003. In essence, whilst there exists no defi nitive defi nition of what fair trade is, it can be understood as an attempt to redress the imbalances that exist in global trade which favour established producers in developed countries over those in devel-oping countries. Emphasis is placed upon securing a fair wage for the production of products that are then sold in the global market. The movement is in essence a collective international one with a common aim to attain a fairer deal for producers in LDCs and has typically been associated with the production of primary agricultural products; for example, bananas, coffee, tea and chocolate.
Although the concept of fair trade has gained more publicity since the millennium it is not new, with its origins dating from the 1970s when aid agencies began working with craftspeople in developing countries to satisfy a growing demand for ethnic produce in the households of developed countries, being taken forward by niche trading groups (Ransom, 2001).
In attempting to give an explanation of what fair trade is and how it is different in its orientation to the inequalities that are a part of the free trade system, Ransom (2001: 20) asks a range of questions: ‘Can it [fair trade] be made to work for, rather than against, impoverished community producers in the South? Can the process of production be democraticised, ownership shared, organised labour encouraged, child labour made unnecessary, environmental sustainability and human rights promoted? Can consumers be induced to think – and pay – more than they currently believe is necessary?’ The questions contain strong ethical issues about the nature of the relationships of the developed countries with the developing, the relationship of consumerism with production, and about how global trade may be compounding poverty.
A key component of fair trade is subsequently that whilst goods have a slightly higher price than comparative non-fair trade produce, as they are not mass produced and the system is dealing with smaller stakeholders, the revenues are returned to the producer at source. The advantages of this system is that the extra revenues gained by small-scale agricultural producers in an LDC can provide the means to realise the opportunities for children to attend school or gain access to improved health care. To date, the Fair Trade System has been primarily applied to commodities with little application to the service industries including tourism (Cleverdon and Kalish, 2000). One country that has taken an initiative in establishing a fair trade policy is South Africa with its development of a Fair Trade Tourism South Africa (FTTSA) as is explained in Box 5.5 .
BOX 5.5 FAIR TRADE TOURISM SOUTH AFRICA (FTTSA)
The issue of LDCs gaining access to global markets to be able to trade on a level playing fi eld with developed countries is a central one and the emergence of the loosely allied concept of Fair Trade, which guarantees a just renumeration to the producer – for example, coffee and tea farmers – is one way of attempting to combat discriminatory practices and imbalances in trade. To date, the Fair Trade ideal has had little application in tourism but one country that has attempted to develop a Fair Trade tourism system is South Africa, the only country to have an independent certifi cation scheme for tourism. The normal process in Fair Trade schemes is to have an independent third party who will provide assurances to the consumer that a product or service meets ethically defi ned requirements, including sustainable develop-ment and community participatory approaches to developdevelop-ment.
The key aim of Fair Trade Tourism South Africa (FTTSA) is to enhance black participation in decision-making and reduce poverty in post-apartheid South Africa. The history of the Fair Trade movement in South Africa dates to its instigation in agriculture in the 1990s as the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO) certifying cooperative and commercial farms meeting their criteria. Tourism was identifi ed as a priority economic sector for development in the South African Govern-ment’s ‘Tourism White Paper’ of 1996 and also through PPT as a means for poverty reduction. A key feature that emerged to be embedded into the FTTSA certifi cation scheme, and one that runs central to development and the pro-poor agenda, was good govern-ance that recognises human rights, sustainable development and the empowerment of the poor.
FTTSA particularly focuses on the certifi cation of black or community-owned businesses and employs approximately 2,000 staff of which 80 per cent are black. It provides an environment to help with the poverty reduction agenda, the advantage for tourism businesses being that the certifi cation offers an enhanced credibility and access to niche markets, augmenting their visibility, viability and sustaina-bility. The effects will also be benefi cial to their supply chain and associated economic sectors; for example, agriculture, which is the main employer of the poor in LDCs. To date, FTTSA has certifi ed over 50 businesses in the accommodation sector and associated serv-ices, including bed and breakfasts, safari lodges, township tours,
shark cage diving and eco-adventures. The scheme has helped to prioritise the needs of those who have previously been discriminated against and marginalised in the apartheid system, and the poor who were capable of engaging with national and international markets but required support to do so. The overall success of the scheme to date in empowering poor communities and reducing poverty has led to the FTTSA now providing support to Madagascar and Mozambique to develop their own FTT certifi cation schemes.
Source: based upon Boluk, 2011
SUMMARY
•
Given the comparative advantage of the natural and cultural resources for tourism in many LDCs, and the emphasis for the World Bank and IMF on Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS), governments need to identify how to utilise tourism development to maximise its positive impact for creating liveli-hood opportunities for the poor. The evolution of a policy framework for tour-ism’s use for poverty reduction can be attributed to three key sources. It has been advocated through the United Nations World Tourism Organisation’s (UNWTO) ‘Sustainable Tourism Eliminating Poverty Program’ (ST-EP); the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development’s (DFID) ‘Pro-Poor Tourism’ (PPT) policy; and the work of the Netherlands Agency for International Development (SNV). A key concept related to the use of tourism for poverty reduction is pro-poor growth (PPG), which was a term fi rst used towards the end of the 1990s. However, similar to the concept of development, as to what ‘pro-poor growth’ is and how it should be achieved is contested.The debate between ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ PPG refl ects complex philosoph-ical, political and economic arguments and positions.
•
Pro-Poor Tourism represents a logical development of the Pro-Poor paradigm and although it sounds like a new kind of alternative tourism, it is an approach and not a product. As the term infers, PPT suggests an orientation of the tourism system and industry to generate net benefi ts and livelihood opportuni-ties for the poor. It can be applied to mass tourism as well as post-Fordist models of tourism, and is the only tourism policy to have poverty as its key focus. The geographical focus of PPT is also more closely defi ned than for other types of tourism, focusing exclusively on developing countries. Similar to the evolution of PRSs, it is evident that PPT does not necessarily represent a radical challenge to the status quo of the existing political economy. It can operate as a concept within existing political structures, including neo-liberalism, provided that the benefi ts of tourism include and target poor people.
•
An evident pre-requisite for tourism development is that there is an asset base of natural and cultural resources that are attractive for tourists. Consequently, tourism’s use in combating poverty will be restricted to specifi c regions and locations, and subsequently not all LDCs and developing countries will be able to benefi t equally. In Ricardian terminology, some developing countries and regions will possess the natural and cultural resources that lend them a much stronger comparative advantage than other places. Although PPT and ST-EP are signifi cant policy initiatives, the utilisation of tourism to combat poverty faces signifi cant challenges, which has led to a questioning of the extent that tourism can actually alleviate poverty and assist poor people to have improved livelihoods.