‘Tourism with Benefits?’; a Comparative Study of Women’s Sustainable Employment and Economic Empowerment through Pro-Poor Tourism in Cambodia and Cuba

Both tourism and development through tourism policy are gendered. While Global South governments have used mass tourism as a driver of development, women have not directly benefitted due to the extractive nature of this industry and the persistence of the traditional division of labour. In the 1990s, a pro-poor tourism (PPT) framework was conceived to create sustainable tourism employment and promote the inclusion of the poor. Yet there is limited literature on how PPT initiatives directly impact Global South women. This article contributes to gendered scholarship on tourism, sex work, and PPT by analysing oral history interviews with local women and experts in the two very distinct countries of Cuba (Varadero) and Cambodia (Siem Reap). It explores the economic and societal impact of comparable retraining of sex workers and promotion of ‘homestay’ microenterprise programmes, which could be considered as having adopted a PPT-type approach. In this manner, I illustrate how PPT-style initiatives which promote capacity building, sustainable income and employment, as well as the inclusion of local communities in the decision-making process have the potential to positively improve local women’s economic empowerment and subjective sense of improved social recognition. However, these case studies also highlight how this strategy is not universally transformative and can produce varying results under different institutional contexts. Moreover, it only partially addresses, and sometimes reproduces, structural Global South gender inequalities.