This project provides the opportunity to understand the overall developmental impact of the hotel sector on contrasting developing economies. Hotels can be powerful local economic engines as much of the revenue they generate may flows back into the homes of locally-based employees and businesses that, in turn, spend and pay taxes in the local economy thereby generating indirect and induced economic impacts. However, the development of a hotel sector, in addition to its economic impacts, is also likely to affect wider developmental agendas, such as governance, skills development, agriculture and infrastructure.  There is also the potential for the emergence of a hotel sector to provide a model for the development of a wider private sector, and to stimulate foreign investment.

This project provides the basis for identifying a comprehensive range of these development impacts. The World Bank has developed its existing DOTS framework; we see the goal of this project as being to develop and expand this framework to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the impacts of investments in the hotel sector. This will include not only the economic value chain of the hotels concerned, but also the wider impacts that such investments have on the wider development priorities of the host country as a whole. The study will focus on one hotel in Rwanda (Serena).