The tourism sector in the Mekong region employs hundreds and thousands of people, particularly the poor. These sectors are also vital export industries.

We are preparing to pilot market based interventions for the tourism sector in Cambodia and Lao PDR.

These pilots will complement the Prosperity Initiative and IFC MPDF feasibility studies conducted in 2007 and 2008. The work so far contains the most in depth research of its kind globally and is the first to map all main tourism destinations in Lao PDRand Cambodia, disaggregated by destination and market, to a poverty footprint. Its strong evidence base points to ways in which tourism can contribute to economic development and poverty alleviation in the Mekong; the 2020 potential of the industry is to create additional pro-poor income in the order of $100million to reach 300,000 mostly poor and near poor in Viet Nam, Lao PDR and Cambodia.

The planned piloting activities include:

• working with selected major tour operators to test the proposal that marketing to demonstrated higher poverty impact tourists will create higher poverty impact. in Cambodia and Lao PDR. PI's analysis strongly demonstrates that different mass tourist types or inbound market segments (eg free independent travellers versus groups and then again broken down by source country) spend differently and stay for different lengths of time. Since different types of tourist expenditures and purchases have a different levels of value reaching the poor, tourist spending patterns matter. The pilot would aim to stimulating demand from specific higher poverty targetting segments  deliver proportionally higher levels of employment and income to the poor in the medium to long term through targeted marketing and promotion.
• pilots to improve environmental resource usage and social impact in destinations, such as energy and water efficiency, which will underpin the longer term sustainability of the local tourism industries and therefore help secure future poverty impacts
• literacy pilots to enable a job shift for poor workers in the industry, especially targeting women within service jobs in the industry, thus directly increasing the share of tourism expenditure going to poor households and directly impacting poverty

PI's tourism industry analysis work for Cambodia and Lao PDR also demonstrates a suitable approach for evaluating the poverty reduction status of a country's current tourism industry and to identify policies and actions for improving the development and poverty reduction effect of the industry into the future.