Women cannot lead: empowering women through cultural tourism in Botswana

To rebalance the safari-tourism led tourism development policies in Botswana, the government has initiated a community-based cultural tourism policy, providing opportunities for women to become leaders and entrepreneurs. After reviewing the multifaceted, deeply contextualized and contested concept of women's empowerment, this paper examines perceptions of empowerment in Botswana and how far villagers felt that the new tourism policy has facilitated female agency and opportunity. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with female and male key informants in villages in southern Botswana. The new policy was found to have contributed significantly to a sense of female empowerment expressed in terms of freedom from economic dependency on men and society, and from depravity, emptiness and familial dependency. Women have progressed from passive involvement to active participation in culture-related tourism ventures. They also experienced vocational education but deferred formal educational opportunities to their offspring. Men were seen as facilitators and partners in women's involvement in tourism. However, barriers remain, including lack of startup capital, low levels of education, centralized control of protected tourism sites and low potential earnings. Ways are suggested to enhance the objectives and policies for women's participation in tourism in Botswana and other developing countries.