China Financial Daily

Tourism in Rural Areas
However, developing rural tourism has its challenges. Any successful tourism development, whether pro-poor or not, depends on commercial, economic, and logistical issues, such as the quality of the product, accessibility and infrastructure of the destination, availability of skills, and interest of investors. In most of these aspects, rural areas may well be at a disadvantage compared to urbanised and more developed areas. These challenges may be compounded by political and institutional obstacles, particularly in developing countries, i.e. the administrative complexity of dealing with low-populated areas, the lack of policy co-ordination between rural development and tourism development, and low priority provided to rural areas by central governments. Thus, ways to deal with these challenges are needed.
Rural tourism takes many different forms and is pursued for different reasons. There are
developmental reasons to promote tourism as a growth pole such as for regeneration following
agro-industrial collapse, or diversification of a remote marginal agricultural area into adventure
tourism or cultural tourism. Other reasons relate more to development of the tourism product such
as diversifying a country’s image, or alleviating bottlenecks in popular sites. There are big
differences in approach between Eastern Europe and Africa (the two areas of focus in this paper)
due to their economic legacy and context. But in both, rural tourism is seen as one means to assist
rural economies with the transitions they are facing in order to thrive in a more liberalised economy.
The purpose of this paper is to explore strategies for expanding tourism in poor rural areas. It draws
on an overview of the likely challenges and motivations involved in promoting rural tourism, and
on two new case studies from the Czech Republic and Uganda, complemented by insights from
other rural tourism initiatives elsewhere. It does not focus on rural tourism at well-established or
high-value sites (such as gorilla habitat, famous mountains or reserves), but on bringing tourism
into wider rural areas.