Pro-Poor Tourism Pilots in Southern Africa: The Programme

The Programme: Pro-Poor Tourism Pilots in Southern Africa
The vision of this new programme is for Southern Africa to lead the way in implementing Pro-Poor Tourism (PPT) strategies. Pro-poor strategies are needed to harness the potential of tourism development for poverty reduction, and increase participation of the poor in developing the tourism product. Pro-poor strategies, however, also need to bring some benefit to businesses that adopt them.

International research on PPT has identified considerable potential for increasing the benefits for the poor from tourism. Much has, however, focused on small-scale, community based tourism development projects that were often explicitly set-up by governments and NGOs to generate benefits for poor stakeholders involved. Apart from a small number of innovative commercial companies, the private sector has so far been sitting on the fence, cautiously observing rather than participating. While sustainable tourism has grabbed the worldwide industry, much is focused on environmental rather than socio-economic sustainability. In South Africa, however, pressure for Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), and transfermatic of the tourism industry, is creating opportunities for PPT.

This programme thus has been designed to focus explicitly on what the ‘big’ players, i.e. large commercial tourism businesses, can do to implement PPT strategies. The objectives are two-fold:

One core objective of the programme is to work on-site with partners to advise them on what can be done, and to jointly design strategies and their implementation. It is hoped that when the programme finishes all our partners will have strategies in place and first results will be recorded. Strategies that will be devised will need to make business sense, e.g. because they are cost-savers, because they add-value to the product, or possibly because they help to diversify the product on offer, and at the same time they will need to result in increased benefits for the poor.

A second core objective is to influence the industry by demonstrating achievements and recording successes. For this to happen, the programme needs a strong voice, i.e. the leading industry giants as participants and supporters. While the programme focuses primarily on the private sector, we are also linking up with key government officials in the pilot site areas, through our Advisory Board, and in workshop/network activities, thus providing fora through which policy support for PPT can be encouraged.