Raffles Le Royal Hotel Salon 1, Phnom Penh, Cambodia 12-13.12.2007

Background

Tourism represents around 35% of the world’s exports of services and over 70% in Least Developed Countries. The recognition of tourism as a means to alleviate poverty has turned to creating opportunities for the poor to become involved in the industry – not only as employees, but as suppliers, entrepreneurs, even partners. To achieve this it is necessary to understand at what point in the tourism supply chain the poor can become involved and at what level. Therefore several development organizations have undertaken value chain research to optimize the interventions and also to provide the best possible outcomes for the poor.

Based on previous work of various development partners, the pro poor impact of tourism varies: 

• In 2005, 27% of the tourist expenditure accrued to skilled and semi-skilled people in Luang Prabang, Laos (ODI & SNV); 
• In 2006, around 10% of the $3.12million dollars spent by tourists in Kratie, Cambodia returned to people from a poor or near poor background. (IFC/MPDF & SNV); 
• In Gambia, little of the actual tourist package cost directly reaches the poor. But despite the fact Gambia is a package holiday destination controlled by a few international operators, in a very poor economy, local earnings are considerable (ODI); 
• In Ethiopia, the supply chains throughout the sector afford very little opportunity for benefits from tourism to disperse into the broader economy. The low levels of discretionary spending by tourists – up to five times less than neighboring countries – are a factor of the lack of opportunities to do so. (World Bank)

Since the value chain approach is relatively new in tourism, impacts of the selected interventions have not yet been measured. However, there is a need to monitor the implementation of interventions so that quantified poverty impacts could be demonstrated. This is of importance for 

• engaging the poor in tourism development; 
• optimizing the impacts to the poor; 
• selecting the most efficient intervention points to increase the impact in poverty alleviation; 
• monitoring the impacts in a way that is comparable to other areas within the countries, regions, and sectors; and 
• resource mobilization. 

Objectives

Thus the general objective of the conference is to provide recommendations on the further development of tourism value chain analysis and impact measurement, especially when evaluating pro-poor sustainable tourism development initiatives and programs.

The specific objectives and aims are to 

• provide a synthesis of tourism value chain work conducted by various development partners; 
• build up a consensus on core set of indicators for tourism value chain analysis taking into account demand, supply and yield indicators; 
• reach a consensus on how to measure the core indicators and what are the data inputs required; 
• discuss the next steps for tourism value chains and impact measurement: What improvements are needed for the current tourism value chain research? How to integrate the results of tourism value chains into tourism policies, strategies and master plans? Whether a toolkit for tourism VCA and Indicators is needed to guide the future work, especially related to impact measurement?

Participation

Participants will include development organizations and some of their clients. It is envisioned that maximum 50 participants will attend the conference including MPDF, SNV, WB, ITC, ADB, ODI, GTZ, UNESCO, and UNWTO.