Towards a Tourism and Community-Development Framework: An African Perspective

Abstract

This article examines the perceptions of local people concerning the potential of tourism to alleviate poverty and bring about community development in the Manicaland Province, Zimbabwe. In-depth interviews, direct observations, and informal conversations were used to collect data in the four districts of Manicaland where there were functional community-based tourism (CBT) projects. After establishing a poverty criterion, data were collected from 43 local poor people in the four districts of the case study area. The results show that tourism development in Manicaland brought about community development through social, economic, environmental and cultural benefits. The authors suggest that there are interrelationships between tourism, poverty alleviation and community development. They show these interrelationships through a tourism and community-development framework which they developed based upon the results of the various methods of data collection used in this study.