John Hummel, Regional Senior Adviser/Network Leader, Pro-Poor Sustainable Tourism, SNV Asia |
John Hummel has been working in pro-poor, sustainable and ecotourism, and rural development for more than 15 years, as adviser, researcher, and as a professional in the tourism industry. He has been employed with SNV Netherlands Development Organisation as a pro-poor sustainable tourism adviser for more than twelve years. He worked in many countries in the Himalaya (Nepal, Bhutan, India, and Bangladesh), the Mekong (Lao PDR, Cambodia and Vietnam), and the Balkans (Albania). He initiated the tourism development components of SNV in Albania, Nepal, and Bhutan, and is currently supporting pro-poor sustainable tourism development sector for all SNV countries in Asia. He is the network leader of the tourism knowledge network of SNV Asia, consisting of around 20 tourism advisers. For SNV, he is also the coordinator for the corporate UNWTO/ST-EP Foundation/SNV partnership.
His experience and expertise involves capacity strengthening to national and local tourism organisations in pro-poor tourism value chain development, public private partnerships, participatory approaches in tourism planning and development, and strategy/policy development in pro-poor sustainable tourism. He has worked with national and local governments, private sector and international and national NGOs. He published on pro-poor and sustainable tourism, and developed and conducted training courses on several aspects of sustainable tourism development for poverty reduction. Recently, he co-edited a training reference manual for the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development on ‘Facilitating Sustainable Mountain Tourism’ (two volumes – resource manual and tool book).
SUMMARY OF ADDRESS
The presentations main aims are to introduce SNV, which works on poverty reduction trough partnerships in tourism. SNV’s core business is capacity development to support local actors to strengthen their performance. Furthermore the presentation focuses at the impacts of pro-poor tourism, market based solutions in value chain developments and multi stakeholders collaborations.
The reason why tourism is an important tool to help poor people is that from the total spending of (package) tourists 15-20% stays in the visited country. Also the potential of tourism is growing, especially in several Asian countries the tourism industry grows tremendous.
By the work of SNV several situations as described in the Millennium Goals are improved at the same time, especially poverty reduction, the building of basic services (infrastructure/water supply) and the production of income (employment). In every country SNV is working there is looked how poor can benefit from tourism. In every country there is looked to apply the most suitable solutions. The question is asked: “Where do poor gain the most benefits?” and “Where is the potential to gain most benefits.” This means SNV is first analyzing the market and from that point there is looked at the social and cultural benefits for the people.
The SNV also looks at the value chain of tourism in countries. Besides looking at constraints and solutions, SNV thinks about how poor people might participate in the desired solutions.
Several examples for helping the poor in tourism are: - improve product quality - develop market linkages - not only looking at the poor (small reach) but look at the whole market for bigger results - improving policy making and sector coordination.
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