Abstract:

Countries of Sub-Saharan Africa are continuously exploring new development models to stimulate economic growth and enhance the lives of their citizens. Tourism has been identified as an area with the potential to boost the economies of these countries. Though promising, a major hindrance to this strategy is the lack of skilled labor to sustain the novel approach over the long haul. Countries of the sub-region could address this problem by accessing the skills, experiences and resources of its diaspora. The objective of this paper is to propose a virtual community framework (via ICT) to tap into the skills and expertise of Africans resident abroad to train personnel in the tourism sector. The paper outlines the virtual community creation process, instructional delivery strategies, identifies challenges to be encountered in these collaborative efforts and provides some viewpoints for addressing such problems and ends with suggestions for future research and concluding remarks. The paper is conceptual and developed from secondary data collected from the internet, journals, etc.

The Sub-Saharan African Virtual Community (SSATVC) concept would involve the various Sub-Saharan African countries and the AU (African Union). Its creation incorporates five stages:
1. Governments of each participating country, through their NTOs (National Tourism Organizations) will organize various tourism stakeholders and conduct a needs assessment to determine tourism skills needed by each country.
2. Skills identified in the needs assessment would be submitted by each government to the AU Secretariat and their respective foreign embassies.
3. The AU Secretariat in conjunction with these embassies would organize meetings with African diasporas in their host countries to identify diasporas with relevant skills and who have a desire to participate in the project.
4. The AU working with these embassies will verify and vet credentials to create a registry. From this skills registry, individual diasporas with the necessary skills consistent with skills in the needs assessment and willing to serve as instructors would be constituted into the instructional delivery group.
5. Other individuals in the registry as well as groups constituting stakeholders would be identified to serve as representatives in the Sub-Saharan African Tourism Virtual Community.

The instructional delivery would entail the identified course instructors creating course syllabi and lesson plans to be submitted to the various universities for review and revision to ensure that they meet rigorous academic standards. Once the courses are approved, instructors would liaise with the AVU (African Virtual University) and the various locations where AVU has facilities to commence the instructional delivery. There will be regular monitoring of instructions to ensure they meet set standards.

The SSATVC will include monitoring the overall success of the project, advocate for the diasporas within their respective countries and identify and coming up with suggestions to resolve problems arising from the skills transfer effort. Areas for skill transfer may include computer skills, business marketing, wildlife management, political lobbying skills and cross-cultural competencies, etc. Challenges that might be encountered through this effort are: mutual trust between participating African countries and diaspora, fear of political exploitation, cultural clashes, and lack of reciprocity.

Keywords:

Virtual community, Sub-Saharan Africa, African Union, needs assessment.