University of Dar es Salaam

‘Towards e-commerce use for pro-poor tourism promotion: local providers’ ICT training needs in Tanzania’

In today’s economy small and micro tourism enterprises face enormous difficulty in competing with their larger counterparts, both in terms of their operational capacity to run their business as well as their technological capabilities to operate in a global market place. Despite all the benefits that can be achieved by using ICT, many small and micro tourism businesses have failed to embrace ICT and the internet. Especially in developing countries, local tourism providers have been relying on intermediaries to communicate with their clients, causing a lot of financial leakages. This study seeks to establish the level of ICT skills and an inventory of ICT training needs and their dimensions, as a way to empower the local tourism providers with skills for pro-poor tourism promotion in the changing competitive tourist market demand.

Currently Juma James is completing the course work for his PhD at the University of Oldenburg, he will then go for a first field visit to Tanzania.