Tangible ways forward

According to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), “a well-trained and skilful workforce is crucial for tourism to prosper. The sector can provide incentives to invest in education and vocational training and assist labour mobility through cross-border agreements on qualifications, standards and certifications. In particular youth, women, senior citizens, indigenous peoples and those with special needs should benefit through educational means, where tourism has the potential to promote inclusiveness, the values of a culture of tolerance, peace and non-violence, and all aspects of global exchange and citizenship” (UNWTO, 2015).

Quality primary, secondary and tertiary education should include a set of multifaceted programmes and initiatives, which creatively span across all the SDGs. In addition, the academic curricula should foster awareness and engagement with the pillars of sustainable development – people, places and progress. Workforce development systems can be conceived at national, regional or sector specific level (Hawkins et al, 2010) and can be embedded within each stage of the educational system – from primary, to secondary and tertiary level.

Primary and secondary education

Educating children and young learners about tourism is increasingly important for numerous reasons. It provides the opportunity to expose them to both positive (i.e. income generated through tourism enables their parents to pay their school fees, feed them adequately, buy them toys or nice clothes) and negative effects (i.e. cultural commodification, loss of traditions, child/youth sex exploitation) of tourism. This is important to not only enable them to distinguish bad from good at an early stage of their education, but also to recognise the direct impact tourism has on their lives.

Tourism can also be a vehicle to enhance children and youth awareness about the natural environment within which they live. Appreciating indigenous wildlife, children and youth may become better equipped to grasp the importance of conserving certain species. Initiatives aimed at preserving the environment could become a vector and a catalyst to engage children in issues such as climate change and practicing sustainable living. In a similar vain education on heritage and understanding the cultural components of tourism can be used as a stimulus for their appreciation and engagement of their heritage and culture and provide opportunities for its celebration and preservation.

Tertiary education and vocational training

This should ideally adopt a partnership approach in creating competitive clusters to ensure that the necessary skills are developed to meet current job requirements and respond to possible future changes in the tourism market place. Importantly, they ‘should be considered as an investment, not simply as a cost’. Recently, the importance of training at every level of the tourism value chain, from community-based projects to large chain-operated enterprises (Dosswell, 2000; Christie et al, 2013) has been linked to the ‘concept of community capacity building [,which] is regarded as the ability of people and communities to do works associated with the determinant factors and indicators of the circumstances of socio-economic and environmental contexts’ (Aref and Redzuan, 2009). Building the capacity of communities to effectively address problematic issues and planning for tourism development is a necessary ingredient for success. Capacity building programmes help to improve local ability to participate in the tourism decision-making processes and deliver better and locally grounded results.