As with other global development assistance agencies, USAID is increasingly turning to tourism programs and activities to achieve its overarching goals of reducing poverty and improving livelihoods in the world's less developed countries. The Agency sees sustainable tourism development as having enormous cross-sectoral potential for accomplishing strategic objectives related to economic growth and poverty reduction, biodiversity conservation, and natural resources management, and it is viewed as a powerful tool for addressing other important cross-cutting agendas such as gender equity, global health, and local governance.

Since 2000, the Agency has initiated or completed 123 projects in 72 countries that either specifically relate to the tourism sector or else utilize tourism as a component for achieving other, broader objectives. USAID and Sustainable Tourism: Meeting Development Objectives (3.077MB PDF) — prepared for USAID by the Natural Resources Information Clearinghouse — provides a description of USAID’s cross-sectoral portfolio of tourism programs and activities. These are also catalogued in a searchable database that provides links to project descriptions and associated documents.

USAID is currently evaluating this tourism portfolio to see where it can replicate and/or improve upon results achieved, and is developing guidelines and tools to assist Missions and Bureaus with the design and implementation of successful sustainable tourism programs that will further Agency objectives. Highlights of USAID’s tourism sector portfolio were presented to the global tourism community by USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios (33KB PDF) at UN-WTO’s Policy Forum, convened in Washington, D.C., in October of 2004.