Not all community tourism is pro-poor in this sense. Effects on the livelihoods of the poor Assessing the livelihood impacts of tourism is not simply a matter of counting jobs or wage income. Participatory poverty assessments demonstrate great variety in the priorities of the poor and factors affecting livelihood security and sustainability. Tourism can affect many of these, positively and negatively, often indirectly. It is important to assess these impacts and their distribution.
Waged employment can be sufficient to lift a household from insecure to secure.
But it may only be available to a minority, and not to the poor. Casual earnings per person may be very small, but much more widely spread and may be enough, for instance, to cover school fees for one or more children. Work as a tourist guide, although casual, is often of high status and relatively well paid. There are relatively few examples of successful and sustainable collective income from tourism. Examples from Kenya, Namibia and Zimbabwe illustrate that it can match wage income in scale and that in principle it can benefit all residents, although it can be difficult to manage.