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 moving into the proving stages for the tourism sector in Cambodia and Lao PDR, and will conduct pilot activities in 2009.

This proving work 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 poor in Viet Nam, Lao PDR and Cambodia.

The priorities for poverty impact during the "proving" phase will be:

• working with a few major tour operators that attract high poverty impact customers into Cambodia and Lao PDR to test the feasibility of stimulating demand from high yield segments to deliver pro-poor impact in the medium to long term through targeted marketing and promotion. These activities are designed to generate additional revenue in the local industry with a bias towards pro-poor tourist expenditures, therefore have a direct impact in growing poor household tourism incomes.
• 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
• pilot impact evaluation systems to track the impact of these interventions on poverty and other indicators