Thesis

The research has identified the impacts of tourism development on poverty alleviation and some of the policy interventions that can be considered as part of the planning and management process, who the stakeholders are, and some of the major barriers that exist to using tourism as an effective tool for poverty alleviation. It is clear that for tourism to become an effective poverty tool there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way that we think about tourism and the nature of the policies, plans and practices that are used on order to ensure the poor profit from the tourism development process. The research has also identified the process that could be used to assess impacts, issues in measurement and provided a set of impacts that can be measured and the means (indicators) for measuring them. It is important that a monitoring system that takes into account the capacity of various stakeholders is developed in order that policy makers can be in a position to determine the following: * What plans and programs have been successful? * What made them successful? * What are the essential lessons? * What can be replicated? The hope is that with this level of information there can be a much more effective process of poverty reduction using tourism development as a major tool. The discussion in the paper identified a number of conclusions that are essential in better understanding the relationship between tourism development and poverty reduction. Some of these conclusions include: The need for a high degree of public participation in tourism planning and management process The importance of the commitment and quality of the community leadership. The importance of the community being aware of the positive and negative impacts from tourism. The importance of creating and maintaining enthusiasm of a community in order to achieve success in poverty reduction. The essential role of self help in achieving success. The integral role of partnerships and cooperatives in achieving pro poor tourism objectives. The need to network with other committee based organizations. The need to receive support from various organizations (i.e national and local government, academic and international organizations). The requirement that government plans and policies support tourism community development projects. The need to carefully consider the non-monetary benefits of tourism. Understanding that monitoring indicators must be developed based on who the user is. Gradual development is a key to achieving successful community-based pro poor. Input | Process | Output | Collection of Data | Planning ways on how to collect data. Collection of necessary date for the research. | Accurate basis of information. | Analysis of the Date | Analyzing the gathered data and evaluating what is needed and what is not. Sorting out the pros and cons. | Sorted data that are necessary for the study. | Providing Feedbacks | Provision of the concepts that are obtained from the collected data. | Serves as the hypothesis. | Testing of the Hypothesis | Knowing what or to deal with poverty and its connection with tourism. | Identified issues regarding tourism and poverty. | Finding Solutions about the issues | The problems faced by the poor people. Making solutions to the major problems with the help of tourism. | Implementation and development of livelihood. | | | |