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 African
Pro-poor Tourism Foundation (APTF) is a fully fledged
non-profit organization registered in the USA. Currently,
the organization has a Kenyan chapter which is based
in Nairobi, Kenya. The foundation seeks to use tourism
as a strategic tool to alleviate poverty, promote gender
equity, harness community conservation and intervene
in the reduction of transmission of HIV/AIDS through
tourism.
We at APTF are guided by this slogan "Give the
local community a fish and you feed them for today,
teach them how to fish from the multibillion tourism
industry and you feed them for ever" Tourism
is the world largest growing industry with no signs
of slowing down in the twenty- first century. The industry
is helping the developing nations to earn the badly
needed foreign exchange of which Kenya is not an exception.
The job creation in the Travel and Tourism is growing
one-and-half times faster than any other sector. The
travel and tourism industry is labor intensive and it
employs about 200 million people worldwide.
Pro-poor
tourism is not another form of tourism as many people
tend to think, but it is just an approach that seeks
to harness the raking of benefits by poor local communities
from the tourists spending. Tourism plays a significant
part in contributing to balanced sustainable development
and generates benefits for the poor. The power of tourism
which is one of the most dynamic economic activities
of our time can be more effectively harnessed to address
the problems of poverty more directly. The benefits
of tourism should be widely spread in society and the
poor should benefit from tourism development. Tourism
has emerged in this decade as a central pillar of the
services economy, and it can uniquely help society respond
to global challenges, if its growth is managed wisely,
with an emphasis on ethics, poverty alleviation, the
particular interests of developing states and sustainable
development. The dynamic past and projected growth of
the tourism sector, its broad direct and indirect impact
across all economies - particularly those of developing
states make it particularly well suited as a development
tool.
Tourism
is particularly potent in economic terms in respect
of: job creation, investment attraction, foreign exchange
earnings, poverty alleviation and in social terms in
respect of: youth employment, community enrichment,
gender equality and cultural preservation
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