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Nepal creates short-term jobs for tourism workers amid Covid
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IANS | 21 Jul, 2021
With a large number of workers in the tourism industry rendered
unemployed amid the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, the Nepal Tourism
Board is implementing a programme to provide temporary employment to
those who have lost their jobs.
Launched in partnership with the
United Nations Development Programme, it is offering short-term
employment to lower-level workers in the tourism sector by engaging them
in the sanitisation and maintenance of tourism facilities, which
include trekking routes and bridges along the trails.
On Tuesday,
the tourism board started seeking proposals from local non-governmental
organisations, cooperatives and community-based organisations with a
view to having their participation in the programme, Xinhua news agency
reported.
"We initially started the program early this year in
just five locations," Dhananjay Regmi, chief executive officer of the
tourism board, told Xinhua. "We're implementing this programme
nationwide from the new 2021-22 fiscal year."
Nepal's new fiscal year began on July 16.
According
to Regmi, the programme shall be carried out in all the rural
municipalities of hilly and mountainous districts under a
resource-sharing mechanism as well as in some rural municipalities of
the southern plain districts.
"We aim to provide short-term
employment to 1,600 tourism workers under this program being implemented
under the sustainable tourism for livelihood recovery project," said
Regmi. "We're also going to implement a separate program related to
tourism infrastructure development in which additional tourism workers
will be employed."
Nepal's tourism is among the sectors being hit
hard by the coronavirus, and hotels and restaurants had cut jobs by 40
per cent during the first wave of the epidemic in early 2020, according
to a survey conducted by the Nepali central bank in June 2020.
Ever
since the pandemic befell and a second wave hit in early April this
year, the tourism industry in Nepal has been struggling to recover amid
dwindling foreign arrivals. In 2019, the South Asian country received
1.17 million foreign tourists. The number fell to 230,085 in 2020 and
diminished further to a meagre 58,040 by mid-June this year, according
to the Department of Immigration.
As a result, accommodation and
food services had witnessed a negative growth of 25.72 per cent in the
2019-20 fiscal year, the Central Bureau of Statistics figures show.
According
to the Economic Census 2018 conducted by the bureau, tourism industry
was providing 371,140 jobs in Nepal, making it the fourth largest job
creator.
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