Empowering Tourism Entrepreneurship in Northern Province of Sri Lanka- Prospect and Challenges in a Post-war Environment

Abstract

In the Northern Province of Sri Lanka, many tourism opportunities are available to develop the tourism and hospitality sector, but the area suffers from a lack of effective and efficient entrepreneurship. This study aims to identify the prospects and challenges affecting tourism and hotel entrepreneurship performance in post-conflict areas, in the Northern Region of Sri Lanka. The study was conducted with 66 tourism and hotel entrepreneurs who were selected on a simple random sampling basis and were contacted through a structured questionnaire. In addition, key informant interviews with five tourism experts were conducted to get experts’ opinions. The findings of this research reveal that financial, marketing and technical challenges, particularly inadequate credit line, unfavourable business environment, poor infrastructure, lack of R&D, lack of ICT and creativity & innovation mainly affect the performance of tourism and hotel entrepreneurship. On the other hand, environmental, geographical and human capital prospects, particularly enormous geographical location, seasonal environment, improvement in the security situation, the more significant contribution from war-torn areas, accelerated infrastructure development, public private partnerships for infrastructure development, potential growth in the services sector: ICT, health and education are primarily available to support the tourism and hotel entrepreneurship.