Madikwe Game Reserve, South Africa – Investment and Employment - Responsible Tourism: Critical Issues for Conservation and Development - page 245

South Africa, formerly offering little opportunity for employment and wealth
creation. African wildlife as a product is presented in so many locations, with so
many thematic and aesthetic variants, that it can be particularly difficult to hold a
vision of what a new or developing product should offer by way of differentiating
itself.
Here some questions are posed: Does the government measure and under-
stand the relationships between its investment and the socioeconomic 'dividends'?
How do the investment 'dividends' compare with other projects/sectors compet-
ing for scarce funds? Is a Madikwe-sized project being used to effectively inform
tourism policy/strategy? Also, whether this product (being a destination, in this
study) could or should be developed at all. Does this destination or product fit
comfortably into a portfolio of available provincial, national and regional offer-
ings?
South Africa has shown that it regards tourism as a lead economic sector in
the overall Growth Employment and Redevelopment strategy (Republic of South
Africa, 1996, 1998). Large game reserves and wildlife products are a central part
of the leisure tourism economy in South Africa, so it seems sensible to plan
carefully where large, government-led projects are tabled for development.
Wildlife tourism has been researched from a variety of angles. Much of the
recent research has been driven by the following:

1 The need to demonstrate how the benefits of this form of tourism actually

manifest in the hands of local indigenous populations, who are frequently
poor, and often marginalized.The results of these studies can be fed back into
the policy environment informing issues such as land tenure and access to
capital. Tourism is seen as a sector in which Africa has a natural competitive
advantage and most developing countries have included it as a lead sector for
their economies. But the sector has to converge with national employment
and poverty alleviation targets.

2 The important research driver of nature conservation. It is well understood

that many protected areas in southern Africa have seen government funding
diminish and surrounding local populations grow. The result has often been a
rising gap between the economies of those enterprises (mainly tourism)
within reserves and those without (often subsistence economies). This
competition for economic and physical space has prompted a variety of
research projects aimed at understanding and bringing economic benefit
from various forms of tourism closer to local populations, whilst achieving the
objectives of conservation.

Wildlife and nature tourism is so important to Namibia for instance, that it has
seen focused, community-level research studies such as those summarized by
Ashley (2000) and many others, evolve through to macroeconomic studies such
as Tourism Satellite Accounts (TSAs) recently produced by the World Travel and
Tourism Council (WTTC, 2006).The WTTC study indicates that 16 per cent of
jobs in Namibia are created directly or indirectly by tourism.