Is Zim tourism industry female or male?

Zimbabwe Tourism Authority was celebrated with the usual pomp and fanfare from October 8 to12.
At the close of the fair, Tourism Minister, Walter Mzembi announced that Zimbabwe together with Zambia are launching a joint bid to host the 2011 World Tourism conference.
Tourism is ranked highly as a major foreign currency earner the World over because of the multiple opportunities it presents in terms of trade, employment creation, cultural exchange and other business opportunities.
Its contribution to the National Gross Domestic product is expected to increase from 5,6 percent in 2009 to 15 percent in 2015.
It is indeed a potential platform for economic empowerment in Zimbabwe.
A quick check around Zimbabwe’s hotels and lodges indicates that room rates have already gone up ahead of the festive season, in anticipation of an influx of tourists who normally grace the country around this time of the year.
This is oblivious of how many Zimbabweans particularly women are employers in the tourism sector or can afford to stay in hotels or even those resort areas located in their communities.
What is the place of women in Zimbabwe’s tourism?
For many local people, the ‘Miss’ Tourism Zimbabwe pageant is indeed the face of Zimbabwe’s tourism.
Just as most companies employ women for their front office desks, many of our hotels and restaurants employ great looking women as waitresses, cleaners and hotel managers.
In the Zimbabwean culture, you can never separate women from hospitality can you?
But, let us consider this picture. The colourful Sanganai/Hlanganani Fair where Miss Tourism Zimbabwe Rumbidzai Mudzengerere was a prominent feature was officially opened by Deputy Prime Minister Professor Arthur Mutambara.
The Zimbabwe Council for Tourism president is Mr Emmanuel Fundira while Mr Karikoga Kaseke is the CEO of the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority. Needless to say that the Tourism and Hospitality Industry Minister Walter Mzembi is male.
However, we acknowledge that ZTA Executive Director for Destinations Marketing Tesa Chikaponya is a woman.
While appointment to any office should be based on merit, and the capacities of the above mentioned are not to be undermined, an assessment of the current status of women in the tourism sector reveals that women’s representation in decision-making positions in the sector remains well below 50 percent.
While women may contribute immensely to the tourism sector in form of their labour and their cosmetic value, there remains a yawning gap in terms of their access to and control over proceeds from the sector.
According to a 2011 study commissioned by the World Bank on the Economic Empowerment of Women in the Tourism Sector, general employment patterns still reflect traditional gender roles with very few women employed in the wildlife, adventure safaris and transport sectors that support tourism.
Part of the executive summary of the report reads, “Regarding entrepreneurship, the study reveals that, very few women own large tourism enterprises such as hotels, luxury lodges or wildlife concessions for hunting and eco-tourism.
“Women dominate the SME sector for tourism instead, participating in less lucrative supply chains including crafts, interior decors, small lodges and restaurants and marketing. These supply chains remain small, operate in isolation from the global value chains and have limited potential for growth.”
The institutional frameworks and programmes put in place to support these supply chains are not sufficiently designed to promote their growth and enhance linkages to the global value chains, a necessary development for competitiveness in the tourism sector.
The World Bank study also shows that, while there are efforts towards securing and protecting the legal rights for women especially those related to rights to ownership of assets and protection against discrimination of all forms, the policy and institutional framework for economic empowerment of women still lags behind.
An example cited by the study report, is the Tourism policy, which despite mentioning the importance of women’s economic empowerment in its economic objectives, does not provide specific strategies.
According to the report, most of the institutional strategies supporting training and financing the tourism sector is gender blind.
The major obstacles hindering women’s access to the male dominated supply chains cited in the report include, limited information on the sectors owing to the absence of investment promotions that target domestic, local or indigenous investors.
Other obstacles include the lack of education of financing and investment strategies among women and the high competitive advantages that men have gained over the years by being the first entrants in e.g. the wildlife sector.
In addition there is also limited opportunities for permit and lease based investments, poor access to wildlife land by women and complicated bureaucratic business procedures.
Some of the recommendations provided by the World Bank Study include,
l Specifying women economic empowerment strategies in the tourism policy.
l Instituting a monitoring and evaluation framework for tracking the participation of women in the sector and simplifying business procedures for registering and exporting consumptive tourism products.
l Setting aside a quota for business opportunities for women in the hunting and other wildlife based tourism investment opportunities, mobilising resources to support grass-root tourism activities that involve women
l Developing an improved tourism SME programme with a special emphasis on facilitating linkages to global value chains; among others.
If women are empowered in terms of their access to and control over the tourism resources, as suggested in the study, they are more likely to be able to enjoy their local tourism and not as ‘small houses’ sponsored at the benevolence of their male partners.
Only then can there be a more acceptable ‘sex change’ for our Tourism Sector.

l The Zimbabwe Women Resource Centre and Network is an information-based organisation committed to gender equality and equity. The organisation promotes women’s rights and empowerment by advocating for social and economic justice in Zimbabwe and globally. We would like to hear your views on this issue and more to come.
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