Despite being a highly competitive global industry, the tourism industry has been deemed as a vehicle for poverty alleviation due to its potential to redistribute income to the poor, most often the local communities in developing economies, thereby creating much greater social impacts. We create an empirical framework of poverty alleviation through tourism. The framework arises from what is known about the interaction of the various tourism constructs that can enable tourism to be pro-poor. With data availability, the proposed framework can lead to the creation of specific policy interventions to support pro-poor tourism; and draw conclusions on tourism’s socio-economic impacts on poverty.

Keywords: pro-poor tourism, quadruple bottom line, and sustainable tourism.