Conservation International’s Tourism Value Chain Approach (TVCA) in Madagascar
Beginning in January 2007, CI and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) initiated a project to increase the competitiveness of micro and small tourism enterprises in Madagascar. The project’s goal is to conserve Madagascar’s threatened biodiversity through tourism growth in targeted protected areas in order to create business incentives for conservation.
The project has five primary Objectives:
To foster and sustain the competitiveness of tourism products and services based on harnessing the economic value of Madagascar's unique natural resources, principally its highly threatened biodiversity.
To increase economic opportunities for poor rural households by facilitating value chain linkages, strengthening supporting markets that can serve rural areas and upgrading small firms.
To design and implement concession agreements that generate revenues for communities to manage conservation areas for biodiversity identified through analysis of the range of threats to the species, habitats, and corridors.
To promote policies and processes that improve the enabling environment for business and that recognize poor people, women and marginalized groups as legitimate stakeholders.
To establish a learning system to transfer knowledge from the project sites to other tourism destinations in Madagascar with the potential to protect threatened biodiversity, to enable local organizations to increase their effectiveness and to share learning with the enterprise development community.
