MONTEGO BAY, St James — The head of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) believes Jamaica is the country in the Americas best suited to establish a tourism academy.

Zurab Pololikashvili, the UNWTO secretary general, advanced the argument last Friday during the opening ceremony of the second Global Tourism Resilience Day Conference at Montego Bay Convention Centre in St James.

“In the Americas, 80 per cent of the population don’t speak English, [they] speak Spanish. So there is a need, and there is a big space to have [the] educational centre in English, and there is a huge demand. Where is the better place to do it if it’s not Jamaica?” said Pololikashvili, who is also a Georgian politician and diplomat.

“For Jamaica, tourism is its DNA. For Jamaicans, tourism is the big part of the economy,” he added to support his argument.

Pololikashvili, however, said there is a need for investors to help set up the proposed tourism educational centre.

“We need more money here. We need more investments, more foreign direct investments in the region. And there is a field, there is infrastructure, people are ready. We will have this educational centre in the pilot but we need investments, we need money,” he said.

His proposal was welcomed by Jamaica’s Tourism Minister Ed Bartlett who noted that Pololikashvili, after visiting the Global Resilience and Crisis Management Centre at The University of the West Indies, Mona campus, had raised the possibility of it being expanded into the proposed academy.

“That’s a discussion we have had, and he even went up to Mona, looked around, and we think that there is a possibility for us to expand the centre that we have there and to morph it into this academy, or it could be some other location in Jamaica, but definitely Jamaica will be the centre,” Bartlett told the Jamaica Observer after Pololikashvili’s address to the two-day conference held under the theme ‘Navigating the Future of Tourism Resilience’.

Bartlett also reiterated his proposal for the development of a resilience fund through UNWTO “for the purposes of adaptation and mitigation and to build human capacity to manage disruptions”, and said that it has won Pololikashvili’s support.

“He now wants to look at that through the lens of the UNWTO,” Bartlett said.

“We have 150 countries that are members of the UNWTO… If we can have a programme through tourism contribution at a level of resilience tip so that [at] every point of consumption you make a contribution that goes into that fund in the country that you are. So, it goes to the country — not to the UN, not to any multi-lateral agency that has to carry you through hoops and all sorts of layers of bureaucracy for you to access it,” Bartlett explained.

Meanwhile, Pololikashvili expressed confidence that the third conference will be bigger than the second staging.

“Next year will be much bigger, and I promise, I want to make this event a regular one. Why? Because, again, in the Caribbean we need presence, we need to support countries, we need to support families who are living and their income is only from tourism and agriculture and fishing,” the UNWTO secretary general said.