Tourism to help poverty elimination

The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) forecast that the tourism sector will have the biggest labour demand in Vietnam by 2015, accounting for around 15% of the whole country’s labour force. The trained tourism workers will get high incomes, contributing to poverty elimination and the country’s socio-economic development.
More job opportunities for the poor
The tourism sector needs lots of labourers and in fact creates numerous jobs for female and young labourers, as well as creates the added value for local products. The United Nations’ World Tourism Organization (UN-WTO) has proposed assistance mechanisms for tourism to eliminate poverty and reduce hunger in Vietnam, under which the poor can be given jobs at travel firms or they can provide products and tourism services for tourism businesses as well as sell goods and direct services for tourists. The development of human sources can help the poor improve their skills, develop new products and raise the quality of existing products, know ways to get access to the market, as well as skills to manage small and medium enterprises.
According to the statistics of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, social earnings from the tourism increased 18.15 % on average between 2000 and 2008. In comparison with the country’s GDP growth, the average revenue from tourism in the period of 2000-2008 accounted for around 4.5 % of GDP yearly, even 5.23 % in 2006. The Administration of Tourism’s survey showed that the tourism sector’s number of direct and indirect labourers had reached more than one million by 2008. The sector’s average growth reached 28.7 % per year. If comparing with the country’s total number of labourers by July 1 2008, the amount of tourism workers (both direct and indirect labourers) accounted for 10% in service area in particular and 4 % in the whole country’s labourers.
Training to improve labour force
Experts said that labourers of the tourism sector have relatively high incomes and particularly create the huge social labour capacity. According to the sector’s statistics, the social labour capacity of hotels and restaurants ranked sixth out of 18 sectors in the country’s economy and folds 2.36 times against the society’s average labour capacity. This proves that the tourism development has contributed significantly to settle the country’s economic and social issues and create more jobs for the society.
Douglas Hainsworth, senior advisor of the European Union-funded human source development project, said that Vietnam’s tourism sector is trending to expand to poor areas, in which almost all people have low skills, not yet been trained. In areas, the lack of skilful workers is becoming a challenge. Lots of positions in the tourism sector can be taken over by local residents if they are trained professionally. The situation indicates the necessity and importance of developing human sources at localities, contributing to create opportunities for the poor to benefit from suitable training courses.
Thus, Douglas Hainsworth noted, it is vital to raise the capacity of labourers and professionalize in all phases of training in order for sustainable development and huge benefits from the non-smoke industry.
Douglas Hainsworth proposed that Vietnam should boost further opportunities for the poor, rural areas which are plentiful with tourism sites by organizing training courses and providing supplementary trainings of living and professional skills, seeking for partners and assistance organizations. The training of living skills, according to Douglas Hainsworth, will help the poor manage effectively their incomes in order to avoid falling back the poverty again.
Eliminating poverty is one among main purposes of the development strategy of human sources via tourism activities. Therefore, building strategic and professional plans and combining the plans with the sector’s policy making are very essential.