UN Steering Committee on Tourism for Development (SCTD) meet for First LDCs Workshop in Geneva, Switzerland, 18-20 October 2011

At LDC IV in Istanbul the SCTD was officially launched. As a result, various LDC stakeholders approached the SCTD Agencies to request assistance to better assess tourism development-related needs and to possibly benefit from Agencies’ support in preparing Tier 2 project proposals. In order to respond to these LDC requests, the SCTD met on 21 June in Geneva and agreed to hold a first workshop in October 2011 with those LDCs having manifested a keen interest and readiness to embark in projects aimed at developing their tourism sector under the EIF, with the assistance of the SCTD.

The workshop will also provide an opportunity for tourism focal points to have a better understanding of the Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF) and how its mechanisms can be utilised to develop comprehensive tourism strategies and action plans where these are not yet in place, as well as the leveraging of human and financial resources to respond to the priority interventions.

The LDCs participating in this first SCTD workshop are those who have identified tourism as a priority sector and have demonstrated at LDC IV a keen interest to work with the SCTD initiative to develop EIF Tier 2 projects, namely: Benin, Burundi, Cambodia, Comoros, Lesotho, Maldives, Sao Tome et Principe, and Uganda. LDC participants were requested to hold in-depth consultations on tourism development at the country-specific level with all relevant stakeholders before coming to the workshop. They were also requested to prepare country-specific presentations on the needs of the tourism sector and the implementation of their EIF Action Matrix.

The workshop will help identify specific tourism-related needs of LDCs and match them with SCTD Agencies willing to partner by proposing targeted and concrete interventions. The Agencies and LDCs will be encouraged to commit to organizing in-country follow-up consultations with the relevant stakeholders of EIF and Tourism development. It is expected that the LDCs, with the assistance of SCTD Agencies as well as the EIF Executive Secretariat and the Trust Fund Manager, will subsequently be able to prepare corresponding Tier 2 project proposals by end 2011, for local approval and subsequent submission to EIF Board endorsement by mid-2012.