In late 2020, when Nepal was reeling under the first wave of COVID and when the tourism industry was undergoing one of the worst times in its history, what mattered the most was jobs. Tourism was one of the hardest hit sectors. Thousands of tourism workers, such as porters, tourist guides, mountain guides and hotel workers lost jobs and there was no hope of immediate revival of the heyday of the tourism industry. Considering the need for livelihood recovery, Nepal Tourism Board (NTB) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) jointly launched a new project “Sustainable Tourism for Livelihood Recovery” to support the recovery of Nepal’s tourism. The US$ 2 million project co-funded by NTB and UNDP started creating short-term jobs for the affected communities, particularly women and people from disadvantaged groups, whose livelihood was dependent on tourism. Initially the project aimed at creating around 1600 short-term jobs, which was soon expanded to cover a larger number of workers.
Dr. Dhananjay Regmi, CEO of the Nepal Tourism Board, has been one of the key persons behind the project. One year after the launch of the project, UNDP’s communications officer Kamal Raj Sigdel caught up with Dr. Regmi in Pokhara on World Tourism Day to take stock of the progress made so far under the NTB-UNDP-local government partnership and explore new possibilities ahead. Back then, he says, we had a very big challenge to keep thousands of professional tourism workers intact in the sector so that they don’t switch to other professions or leave the country for foreign employment. The immediate solution, he says, was to engage the ones who had lost jobs in repairing or constructing small-scale tourism infrastructures in the tourist hotspots so that we are creating emergency employment, and at the same time, preparing for re-opening our tourist destinations once COVID restrictions are lifted. Moving ahead, Dr. Regmi sees the prospects of engaging a large number of unemployed youth and surplus tourism workers in developing new tourist destinations across the country.
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