Abstract
This article examines the perceptions of local people concerning the potential of tourism to alleviate poverty and bring about community development in the Manicaland Province, Zimbabwe. In-depth interviews, direct observations, and informal conversations were used to collect data in the four districts of Manicaland where there were functional community-based tourism (CBT) projects. After establishing a poverty criterion, data were collected from 43 local poor people in the four districts of the case study area. The results show that tourism development in Manicaland brought about community development through social, economic, environmental and cultural benefits. The authors suggest that there are interrelationships between tourism, poverty alleviation and community development. They show these interrelationships through a tourism and community-development framework which they developed based upon the results of the various methods of data collection used in this study.
Highlights
According to Przeclawski, “Tourism, in its broad sense, is the sum of the phenomena pertaining to spatial mobility, connected with a voluntary, temporary change of place, the rhythm of life and its environment, and involving a personal contact with the visited environment” [1]
This article has shown that tourism development in poor rural African communities has the potential to alleviate poverty and bring about community development through a case study of Manicaland Province, Zimbabwe
It is argued that pro-poor tourism (PPT) has the capacity to promote linkages between the tourism industry and the poor [164], other PPT initiatives such as community-based tourism (CBT) have been criticised for concentrating on the provision of training and infrastructure while neglecting provision of markets for PPT products [244]
Summary
According to Przeclawski, “Tourism, in its broad sense, is the sum of the phenomena pertaining to spatial mobility, connected with a voluntary, temporary change of place, the rhythm of life and its environment, and involving a personal contact with the visited environment (natural, and/or cultural and/or social)” [1]. The past six decades have seen tourism becoming the largest and fastest growing economic sector of the world due to its continued expansion and diversification [2]. It generates economic benefits for most nations of the world [3,4,5]. Global international tourist arrivals were 1235 million in 2016 which generated tourism receipts of US $1220 billion and an additional US $216 billion in exports through international transport services. In Africa, tourism development has been used to enhance communities’ economic and social well-being [7]
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