While a number of African universities provide vocational courses related to tourism, hospitality and tour-guiding, sustainable tourism development is hardly touched upon. There is an urgent need for the upgrading of existing curricula and courses and the development of new ones, especially at graduate level, that deal with sustainable tourism development as a potential way out of poverty. The project beneficiaries include:
- The societies and economies of the 6 beneficiary countries in the broadest sense;
- Six Southern and Eastern African partner universities;
- Within these universities, senior academic research and teaching staff, and (post)graduate students (of which in both categories at least 50% will be women);
- Not-for-profit, public and private sector organisations attending Continuous Professional Development (CPD) modules ? Indirect beneficiaries will also be public and private sector organisations and (I)NGOs who will benefit from applied research related to their operations.
The Action and its Effectiveness
The overall objective of the project is increased competitiveness and excellence of Southern and Eastern African HEIs in research and education in the overlapping fields of sustainable tourism development, environmental sustainability and poverty reduction. The specific objectives are twofold, namely:
- Institutionalized (inter)regional and international cooperation of Southern and Eastern HEIs, their staff and students;
- Efficient and up-to-date academic education concerning sustainable tourism development which aims to alleviate poverty and contribute to environmental sustainability.
Sustainability of the Action
The activities implemented under this project will strongly increase the capabilities of the partner universities’ academic departments, which leads to increased international recognition, and the ability to attract more students.
At the end of the project each partner HEI will have two complete educational modules included into their course architecture (up-and-running and recruiting). Furthermore, each university will have two modules aimed at professional education which target the public and private sector and (I)NGOs and contribute to financial sustainability. These modules are designed to meet market needs in Africa and experience has shown that there is high demand for such professional development opportunities. Furthermore extensive opportunities exist to develop a modular-PG programme which incorporates CPD modules in conjunction with the European partner universities and joint degrees, thus enabling the development of innovative and very attractive educational ‘packages’ in the future.
A key promise of the project is the development of the Southern and Eastern African Young Tourism Leaders Team. These Young Leaders will be able to find high level employment and inform a new Africa-based research agenda related to sustainable tourism and its contribution to environmental sustainability and poverty reduction. This means that the number and quality of experts in Southern and Eastern Africa increases significantly through the implementation of the 3A-STEP project. The establishment of this African-owned network, linked into a global network of experts can also be expected to contribute to preventing the havocs of brain-drain, which harmed Africa so substantially in the past.
