10,000 tourists visit Beqa annually
BEQA Island gets around 10,000 tourists each year, majority of them returning visitors to the island.
And efforts are in progress by Pacific Blue Foundation, a non-government organisation specifically focused on Beqa and nearby Yanuca Island, to explore ways that the numbers could be made to work more for the island economy.
“Through data that we’ve gathered, Beqa receives annual visits by tourists of around 10,000 annually,” Pacific Blue Foundation project manager Tomasi Tikoibua said.
“And most of them are returnees. So that’s only to the hotels around here plus the day trippers who come to feed sharks, or come to dive, etc. So in terms of resources, we now know that there are some unique areas here on Beqa that they keep coming back to see.
“And those are the things we’re trying to develop and we’re trying to help the village committees for them to start using their resources in a way that not only helps the local economy but also in the preservation efforts that is at the heart of our work.”
Mr Tikoibua said the foundation’s next project will be funded by the UK government through the Pacific Partnership Funding and it will be geared towards the establishment of sustainable financial mechanisms on seascape level and also on the island level through district level via the setting up of a village trust.
“The first activity for us is we’ll be doing the Village Development Plan, so the next trip we make here is we’ll go down to the village level so that we can come up with village development plan in all the villages in Beqa and Yanuca.”
The village development plans, he said, will be aligned to initiatives designed take the pressure off exploitation of resources by providing new income streams for the communities.
“These tourists are not just coming back for the sake of coming back. They are returning for something that they are interested in, for example, fire walking. That’s part of the products that’s here in Beqa for tourists that can be used as an income earning thing for them as well as helps them in resource preservation efforts in that they don’t have to go out to sea and exploit their resources to earn money. They can earn money in other sustainable ways.”