Tourism is an industry which is increasingly getting bigger and more significant at a global level,
thus it has come to be considered as an ideal industry to meet the World Millennium Development
Goals, which includes poverty alleviation and development of especially developing countries. This
project sets out to explore how the genesis of social entrepreneurship in tourism practices can be
claimed to be a way to achieve development through socio-economic and socio-cultural
empowerment. Accordingly, it is a research seeking to broaden the understanding of local
participation in tourism based development in the global South - Colombia.
This project is a research concerned with social science using a qualitative research to understand
how community based approaches in tourism practices, initiated by social entrepreneurship,
constitute an engine of development, a research achieved by using an explorative approach.
Accordingly, this research was carried out as an ethnographic research and as a case study of the
organization ‘FEM-Fundación por la Educación Multidimensional’1
placed in Cartagena -
Colombia. Hereby, this project explores the nature of social entrepreneurship in Latin America - a
field remaining understudied - and thus it seeks to shed lights on social entrepreneurship in this
particular region. Additionally, it is a research which seeks to bring forth new perspectives on social
entrepreneurship in relation to development as a consequence of tourism whereas it accordingly
comprises the complexities within drawing usage of the tourism sector as engine for development in
Latin America.