Donor response pleases South Pacific Tourism Organisation

The South Pacific Tourism Organisation (SPTO) has received a great response from donor agencies in their first donor forum.

“And the donor agencies are asking for another forum like this so our chairlady has said that we’ll have another one next year,” SPSE chief executive officer Chris Cocker said.

Meanwhile, SPTO chairperson Sonja Hunter said: “We plan to make this an annual forum where our development partners and donors will hear what SPTO has achieved and also to find out what SPTO will be doing for the coming period. So it’s a good because as they always say ‘when they know they will care, when they don’t know they don’t care’.”

Mr Cocker said SPTO gave the donors a “shopping list” of their proposals.

“And some of them have come back to us saying they are interested. The whole idea is to try and attract their attention to some topics,” he said.

The SPTO chief said they had 16 proposals and there was no way they could do all of them but if they had support for just three or four, that was a big achievement for them.

“So a lot of donors who came in have said they are interested in certain areas; donors like the World Bank, the ADB; this is a good stepping stone for us because once we get in through their doors there are other opportunities you can knock on,” Mr Cocker said.

“The other reason we are doing this is we want to implement our Pacific Tourism Strategy. It has been endorsed by our member states’ ministers but to be able to implement the action plan in certain key areas we need donor support.

“We also need to diversify our funding source. At the moment we are totally reliant on EU but we need to get funding from other donors as well,” said Mr Cocker.

“I would say that whilst it’s not secured the interest is there from certain donors.

“Out of the 14 donors here six of them have shown interest in certain project proposals we’ve outlined and have asked for further elaboration from us.

“We invited 20 donor agencies and 14 attended; we’re just focusing on donor agencies because we want to focus on tourism.”

Mr Cocker also said some of their donors didn’t know what SPTO did and some didn’t know much about tourism and the prospect it offered to the region.

“It was the sharing of information and the connection with our staff here which was the constructive thing about this forum for our donors,” he said

Ms Hunter said their donor roundtable conference yesterday was to introduce some of the concept papers they had on different projects that they had.

“But it was also a forum where development partners got to know a lot about what SPTO is doing and also for us to find out what their criteria are because we are actually here as a regional organisation to help our member countries; we know what their needs are but we have to look for assistance to ensure that the gaps that we have on delivering on the need are met and filled,” she said.

The SPTO, with sponsorship from BSP, yesterday held a donor forum followed by a luncheon at the Holiday Inn Suva, Fiji.