About the project
Tourism is promoted as a strategy for achieving sustainable development by global development agencies as well as nations. Tourism has the potential of creating sustainable livelihoods in rural areas challenged by unemployment and poverty, by creating job opportunities through local scale entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship in tourism is often a matter of finding a niche product based on the natural or cultural features of a particular area. How to develop rural tourism in an economic, social and environmental sustainable way, however, calls for knowledge in a range of different disciplines.
By joining several academic disciplines, it is the overall project goal to equip students of tourism, as well as staff teaching tourism, with the skills, knowledge and competence necessary to develop sustainable tourism based on local rural entrepreneurship and heritage in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Norway.
Project Goals
- Increased student and staff mobility between all three countries for the exchange of knowledge, competence and practical skills.
- Enhance student's and staff's in-depth knowledge on topics related to sustainable tourism, rural entrepreneurship and heritage
- Facilitate exchange of teaching methods and teaching material for teaching sustainable tourism, rural entrepreneurship and heritage.
- Contribute to more practice and research based education by joint cooperation between academic institutions and private sector (local businesses and entrepreneurs)
Financing
SEARCH is financed by DIKU (Norwegian Partnership Programme for Global Academic Cooperation) in the period 2016-2020, supporting academic partnerships and student mobility between partner institutions within higher education in Norway, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia.
Partner universities
- Shota Rustaveli State University
- Batumi Maritime Academy
- Akaki Tsereteli State University (ATSU)
- Issyk-Kul State University named after Kasym Tynystanov
- Kyrgyz Economic University
- ADAM University
- University of Oslo