Basseterre, St. Kitts, September 30, 2020 (ZIZ News):
The Ministry of Tourism is hosting a three-month community tourism-based workshop to inspire and provide opportunities for more women to develop and market their own community-tourism businesses.
ZIZ News spoke with Community Tourism Officer Shaline Welcome who outlined the objectives of the three month workshop.
“Because Community Tourism development aims at creating benefits for the community and its environment, we are hoping that some of the objectives will include nature conservation; helping the communities to conserve and preserve cultural traditions and creating opportunities for them to be able to make additional income.”
The first module of the workshop was conducted virtually and began from Tuesday 22nd September to Thursday 24th September, 2020. Miss Welcome spoke of what took place during that time.
“The workshop in the month of September in the past week was really exciting and persons were able to understand fully what the training was about. During the trainings we are hoping that persons would be able to complete an assessment at the end and for the first phase of the training that we would have had last week, we had persons who fully understood what community tourism was and they understood as well that forming clusters of persons with same interest in community related businesses within the communities would actually benefit them more than if they were actually individuals.”
She said during October and November participants will delve deeper into what community tourism is about.
“The second phase of the workshop will take place in October…for that workshop, we are hoping that we are going to take the community tourism training a little bit further into creating and developing your community tourism business. In the last phase we are hoping to cover the financial aspect as well as assistance to these small businesses in the last month of the training.”
At the end of the training, each successful participant will receive a certificate and the St. Kitts Community Tourism toolkit which will include useful information and material to assist persons in starting their community-tourism businesses.