Community Tourism in Jamaica




	Institute for Hotel and Tourism


		Jamaica Community Tourism Project
	Community tourism offers considerable potential for Jamaica as an area of tourism product diversification. Endowed with a variety of interesting communities in rural settings with outstanding natural, heritage, and cultural resources, Jamaica offers significant opportunities for the tourism sector. Successfully introducing and strengthening community tourism will yield benefits in economic diversification, social stability, and reduction of crime. As such, it is an important priority for the country. Against this background, “The Jamaica Community Tourism Project”, was conceptualized and approved for Funding by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) through its Caribbean Regional Human Resource Development Program for Economic Competitiveness (CPEC) program.
	The CPEC program was approved in February of 1996 with a budget of CDN$25 mil to cover the region; CDN$5 million was allocated to Jamaica.
	The goal of the programme is to strengthen the capacity of the Caribbean Region to compete globally, through human resources and institutional development, aiming to provide trained personnel in key economic sectors that will increase economic competitiveness. The sectors being targeted by CPEC are Tourism and Agriculture. A key feature of the Jamaica Community Tourism Project is the focus on international, market-ready product development for community tourism and training programs to support standards adoption for community tourism products. As this is a relatively new area in the Caribbean, this project will help to establish baseline product standards that can be refined over time and incorporated into ongoing training programs. The central strategy behind the project will be delivery of a community tourism Symposium that focuses on awareness enhancement, brings international travel trade representatives into discussion groups with community tourism product representatives in Jamaica, and provides a forum for discussing community tourism resource material.
	Outlined in the table below are the deliverables of, “The Jamaica Community Tourism Project”.
	This project enlists the support of Jamaica’s tourism sector (both public and private) to facilitate community tourism development and to provide sustainable mechanisms for supporting the development of community tourism products on an ongoing basis. The project includes the commitment of the following partner organizations to play a partnership role in implementation:

	Several associated agencies will also provide support and participation. These include: The Ministry of Tourism – providing input on Symposium organization, planning and policy matters related to community tourism standards; The Tourism Development Company (TPDCo.) – participating in all aspects of the project with a particular focus on the training programs and standards development; Jamaica Tourist Board – providing input on community tourism marketing; and USAID – providing budgetary support for some of the training activities. Return to top