Tourism as a tool to combat poverty

Tourism is a “powerful tool” for combating poverty in Africa, but remains massively underutilised, a conference in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, heard on Monday. David de Villiers, deputy head of the World Tourism Organisation (WTO), said the continent’s governments must place tourism at the heart of their growth policies. “Tourism has the potential to be a powerful tool in anti-poverty and pro-poor development strategies,” de Villiers told delegates at the start of the five-day conference. “We believe that the economic and development strength of the tourism industry should be more effectively mobilised in the fight against poverty.” The WTO conference, attended by delegates from 14 African countries, is aimed at establishing an African tourism forum. But de Villiers, a former South African cabinet minister for tourism, warned that not all tourism was good. In particular, he said that local communities must benefit and the industry would need to be effectively planned if it was to be sustainable. Ethiopian tourism commissioner Yusuf Abdullahi Sukkar admitted that African countries had a long way to go before fully realising their tourism potential. But he added: “Given Ethiopia’s great potential for historical, cultural, natural archaeological, paleo-anthropological and other forms of tourism, one can expect the contributions of tourism to growth and development to be very significant indeed.” Ethiopia earned US$77 million from tourism in the last year, a “miniscule” fraction of its potential, officials said. Around 156,000 tourists visited the country. Yet tourism is only briefly mentioned in the country’s poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSP), which puts forward the idea of enhancing the Ethiopian Tourism Commission to try and attract more tourists to the country. De Villiers acknowledged that Ethiopia faced enormous obstacles such as weak infrastructure and poor-quality hotels. He said it should develop better facilities such as hotels in the capital before spreading out into the regions. Yusuf said that the country was aiming to boost the infrastructure around historical sites, but added that tourism was also hampered by the negative image of the country.