Development of a Community-based Tourism Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit for Poverty Reduction Planning, Assessment and Management

There is an increasing demand and attention from the development and donor sectors on how to claim tourism as a contributor to poverty reduction and sustainable development.

This toolkit is intended to provide an overview of the important concepts and rationale for monitoring tourism impacts and a methodology for developing monitoring and evaluation systems for project-level applications. Specific focus will be placed upon poverty reduction, particularly (though not exclusively) in rural areas.

In developing the Community-based Tourism Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit (CBT-MET) the intention is not to “reinvent the wheel,” but catalogue and review what already exists and make links to this supporting knowledge base. It is designed to be a user-friendly manual that will provide accurate and relevant information on measuring and managing tourism impacts in a community development and poverty reduction context.

The success of the community-based pro-poor tourism initiative is greatly dependent on the ability of the process to monitor the implementation of action plans and achievement of the overall goals and objectives. Thus, it is crucial that constant monitoring be put in place from the beginning in order to ensure that a tourism plan continues to be effective in meeting its poverty reduction goals and to ensure long-term sustainability of the community’s resource base.

A monitoring plan requires a process for ensuring that impacts are monitored and evaluated, in order to both measure success as well as alter the plan itself if desired outcomes are not being achieved.

This toolkit is designed to provide assistance to local officials and communities in developing a monitoring and evaluation program for assessing the positive and negative impacts of tourism in relation to poverty reduction at the local level. It will focus on a step-by-step process for developing a program and will present the available approach/techniques that can be used to assess if the desired poverty reduction results are being met.