Working in partnership with ICRT students Louise Dixey and Yvette Evers and my colleague Lucy McCombes, I am commencing a desk-based review of the contribution that handicrafts make to the livelihoods of communities living in and around popular package holiday destinations. The research is being funded by the Travel Foundation, the charity funded by the UK’s main tour operators, and the findings will be used to establish what can be done in these destinations to increase the contributions that crafts make to local economies. Some of the destinations we are studying include Tobago, St Lucia and Jamaica in the Carribean; the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, the area around Bodrum in Turkey and the Red Sea and Sinai resorts of Egypt.
A full report will be submitted to the Travel Foundation in early April 2011 and will include guidelines on specific projects that can be implemented in some of these destinations to enhance the quality of crafts available, improve market access for local producers and strengthen local linkages between suppliers of raw materials, the craftsmen and women themselves and the vendors who tend to sell the products on to the tourists.
Running in parallel with this work is another project that ICRT is undertaking on behalf of the Travel Foundation, this time focusing in on handicrafts in the Gambia. This work includes the first ever economic impact study of the sector in the country, an exercise that will allow us to examine which groups of craftworkers are most vulnerable to disruption and whose incomes suffer the most when tourist numbers fall off at the end of the season.
If you want to know more about the work that ICRT is doing in the traditional handicrafts sector, don't hesitate to get in touch
