POVERTY ALLEVIATION THROUGH COMMUNITY BASED-TOURISM IN BATTICALOA DISTRICT, SRI LANKA

Abstract

Tourism has the greatest pro-poor impact on rural communities because the customer comes to the facility or product which is creating room for direct sell fostering the creation of the economic effect on the host community. Accordingly, community-based tourism emerged as a possible solution to the mass tourism in developing countries which thus became a strategy for a community organization to alleviate the poverty level. The study aimed the objectives of identifying the potentials for poverty alleviation through CBT and identifying the most influencing challenges when developing CBT. The research has utilized the quantitative approach. The primary data was gathered by using questionnaires. The sample consisted of 60 responders who have been engaging with CBT and 60 responders who have not been engaging with CBT so far. The analytical technique of the study was multiple regression. The sample has been allocated based on the quota sampling and sampling process has been done by snowball sampling. The results indicating that, there is a high potential for poverty alleviation mainly through agro-tourism based activities, since majority of the people are engaging with agricultural activities as their main livelihood. The second objective aimed to identify most influencing challenges for CBT. The study found that CBT challenges as mainly lack of training, lack of e-commerce, lack of skillful employees as major challenges. The results would help in tourism related policy making to alleviate the poverty by providing opportunities for economic activities for the host community