The UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) is finalising a broad-based action plan designed to highlight and uplift the role of women as employers, employees and travellers in the multi-billion-dollar global travel and tourism industry. Part of a special UNWTO Women in Tourism Initiative, the plan is designed to raise and maintain awareness about the social and economic opportunities that tourism can offer to women, stress the need for appropriate policy frameworks to promote women's empowerment and protect women's rights in tourism and encourage the public and private sectors to facilitate the achievement of gender equality in tourism development.

According to the International Labour Organisation, today women comprise 60% to 70% of the global tourism workforce compared to the early 1980s, when they only represented a third of this segment. In catering and accommodation, women accounted for more than 90% of all employees.

The framework of the plan was put together last year at a think tank organised on World Tourism Day in Sri Lanka on the theme of ''Tourism Opening Doors For Women'' and its inter-relationship with the MDGs.

Chaired by Nilofar Bakhtiar, a former tourism minister of Pakistan, a group made up mostly of women who have played prominent roles in tourism discussed the need to create more awareness of the opportunities for women and address their concerns amongst general policy makers and amongst women themselves.

According to Mrs Bakhtiar, ''The requirement is not only to open doors, but to make it possible for women to go through them, including good training, development programmes, targeted information, decent and equal pay, good career development, family support structures and frameworks for ensuring self-respect.''

This includes everything from focusing on the specific opportunities presented by agrotourism, ecotourism, health and wellness, and the creative sector, as well as the fundamental requirement for the Public Sector to put in place and implement legislation for equal opportunity and fair working conditions, especially the need to address unreasonable working hours.

The plan, soon to be made public, will seek to put in place a data collection system, covering desk research and case studies on women's employment including occupations and positions held by women in the tourism industry, women's access to tourism training and capacity-building via e-learning and training for self-employment.

The data collection also will cover direct access to credit facilities for women entrepreneurs in the tourism, including micro-credit, women-run tourism businesses, and the number of women directly benefiting from development assistance schemes in tourism. It will also gather sex-disaggregated statistics on international female tourist arrivals and overnight stays.

The plan will expand the website www.tourismgender.com into a portal to serve as a global knowledge sharing e-network and launch a global campaign aimed at governments, industry and media. It suggests organising annual fora at international tourism fairs aimed at exchanging experiences, disseminating good practices and acknowledging outstanding achievements of women leaders as motivation for other women.

It will also appeal to tourism workers unions and non-governmental organisations to denounce gender-related exploitative practices by businesses operating in the tourism sector. A network of activists, ambassadors and advocates and experts in gender issues will also be put together.

During the discussions in Sri Lanka, the group highlighted the ''danger of self-delusion in considering primarily the beneficial aspects of tourism and women while ignoring the darker side of exploitation, harassment, abuse and marginalisation.''

According to Mrs Bakhtiar, ''Societies where women are more equal stand a much greater chance of achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. Every single goal is directly related to women's rights and societies where women are not afforded equal rights as men can never achieve development in a sustained manner.

''In Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where women have been given a chance to succeed through small business loans or increased educational opportunities, families are stronger, economies are stronger, and societies are flourishing.''

Imtiaz Muqbil is executive editor of Travel Impact Newswire, an e-mailed feature and analysis service focusing on the Asia-Pacific travel industry.