Enhancing sustainable tourism, cleaner production and export capacities in Lao People's Democratic Republic - Phase 2

The main objective of this multi-agency project is to develop an overall competitive tourism industry through a variety of initiatives carried out by various agencies and their local counterparts. The ILO had several components in the first phase, including developing competency standards for specific hospitality areas, supporting entrepreneurship training in tourism communities through the KAB curriculum, and strengthening guesthouse operations in the focal area, Luang Prabang. In the current second phase, the ILO component is focussed on continuing efforts with KAB as well as building on the tourism SME support based on its toolset of tourism materials developed with ASEAN.

Training Tools for Lao Tourism SMEs

The ILO component of the project includes introduction of a low cost, innovative training approach designed to support business skills development and empowerment of local guesthouse owners and their staff, leading to improvements in livelihoods, productivity and working conditions. Funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), the ILO’s work in this area has resulted in the ILO collaborating with ASEAN on a broader set of tools, covering a range of tourism micro- and small business sub-sectors, including market vendors, restaurants, handicrafts and small farming for tourism. See more

The guesthouse materials developed in Laos, including both a training package (both facilitator and participant guides, as well as a training implementation guide) and good practice guide, are based on the ILO’s Community-Based Enterprise Development (C-BED) training methodology. C-BED is unique in that actual training is built around peer-to-peer, activity based learning methods with no requirement for teachers, experts, or external consultants specialised in the skill area. Instead, guesthouse representatives participating in the training work together through a series of activities and discussions guided only by simple step-by-step instructions in the training manual.

The approach used in the programme dramatically cuts costs, as training can be organized by any institution without needing to hire external experts, and can be run in any suitable setting. New knowledge, skills and competencies are developed through the interactions between participants and sharing of existing local knowledge and experience. In this way the programme is a low cost, sustainable option for any organization or community.