Pro-Poor Tourism and Its Seeming Upshots on a Locality – An Exploratory Approach

This paper makes exploratory attempts to study Pro-Poor Tourism and its benefits as well as importance to a Locality. The objectives of the study are to: assess the impact of PPT to a locality, investigate the challenges of PPT as it relates to a locality and to propose PPT strategies to facilitate local growth and development. The design employed for this study was that of the exploratory research design and data was collected from 200 respondents representing indigenes from Varanasi through a structured questionnaire as well as from secondary sources. To examine the hypotheses of the study, cross-tabulation analysis, correlation analysis as well as chi-square test were employed as statistical tools for analyzing the study variables. The findings of the study revealed that PPT passes as a vibrant tool for local development since it affords the indigenes the luxury of gaining employment which leads to income generation thereby reducing poverty and largely improving their quality of life. It was therefore recommended that PPT requires multi-level strategies to be able to achieve its objective of developing a locality