07 Jul 2020|Noida | Amity University, Noida
The Future of Pro-Poor Tourism
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A webinar on ‘The Future of Pro-Poor Tourism’ was conducted by Mr. Kevin Nehemiah Phun - Founder - Centre for Responsible Tourism Singapore who shared that this subject had a number of examples coming from India. He stated that he did not want to talk about a Covid 19 induced topic and the concept of using tourism to alleviate or reduce poverty has been increasingly trendy. It is often used by NGOs to create benefits for the poor and to resolve local development issues. Mr. Phun averred that this is coinciding with rising trend of people favouring rural tourism rather than visiting crowded cities. Talking about aims and outcomes of rural tourism, he shared that this tourism hopes to achieve revenue streams for rural places; educating the rural people; develop better understanding of culture amongst locals of rural places; preserve cultural heritage; to improve the standard of living; to ensure quality of life amongst rural residents and branding of destinations based on their cultures.
Sharing what is wrong with some of the pro-poor tourism projects he stated the reasons that include how these are not really aimed at resolving issues the poor face; the locals not involved in the formulation of strategies; local issues not reflected in the objectives and strategies; NGO driven, non-profit mindset and far from the market or incur little demand from the market. Mr. Phun also shared the challenges in measuring progress that included little research being done into the success of the initiatives by different actors to make tourism more ‘pro-poor’