Sustainable Tourism

An important non-agricultural value chain for the world’s poor, Counterpart International supports individuals and small businesses to benefit from sustainable tourism. This is gained through a holistic approach, incorporating best practices in both pro-poor economic development and climate change adaptation.

Our approach to raising the incomes of the poor starts with Value Chain Analysis, identifying key products and sub-sectors, mapping out key actors, and processes of adding value and upgrading. Our interventions are determined on the basis of constraints, providing assistance at multiple levels of the value chain, from production through the end user.  As we have done in the Dominican Republic and Honduras, this may involve direct assistance to diving and fishing associations, providing them with the means to cooperate, develop and standardize their product offerings. Alternatively, as we have done in Guatemala, our assistance may be directed to tour operators, leading them to open new routes and take advantage of the services of local businesses in the area.

While an essential output of our work is increasing incomes for the poor, the story does not end there. Tourism provides an important resource by which local communities, the businesses and entrepreneurs within them are able to diversify their incomes away from resource-intensive practices with detrimental impacts on the environment. Counterpart’s Ethiopia Sustainable Tourism Alliance (ESTA) project does just this, working directly with populations on the fringes of environmentally sensitive national parks, not only training them to be tour guides, but directing business to them through investment in eco-lodges and tour operators. In this case, local residents are gradually diversifying their incomes away from land cultivation and tree felling to tourism.