World Bank invite for professor to address tourism issues

Professor Tom Baum of the Department of Human Resource Management was invited by the World Bank to participate in a Tourism Workshop for the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region in Tunis. The purpose of the workshop was to address the re-emergence of tourism as a major economic sector within the region in the light of recent (and, indeed, on-going) political and social change. The audience included government and private sector leaders from across the region together with a range of participants from the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation. Using video links, the meeting ran simultaneously in Tunis and Washington DC.

Professor Baum's contribution was to address the theme of 'Tourism Skills and Capacity Building - Strategies to Increase the Participation of Youth and Women' and, in addressing this theme, he was able to draw on recent studies for the ILO on the impact of structural and technological change on employment in tourism; on tourism employment and migration; and, most recently, on gender participation in the international tourism sector.

The MENA region faces particular challenges in providing opportunity for its growing youth population and Professor Baum challenged a common mantra that tourism's largely low skills job opportunities are necessarily a panacea to solve this problem. In relation to encouraging the wider participation of women in tourism work, MENA's changing political and cultural landscape is particularly challenging but discussion focused on geographical and employment contexts in the region where opportunities for greater gender equality could be fostered.