Impact of Community Based Tourism on Women’s Empowerment in Karpaz, Northern Cyprus

Community Based Tourism (CBT) has been one of the core branches of tourism due to the constant transformation in the supply and demand changes of the sector. CBT has great potential to accelerate the newer economic opportunities for the small communities. However, very little is known about the gender differences, especially, in terms of local women and their involvement in this branch. Due to the lack of concrete associations of gender differences along with the community development process, this study is designed to close the gap in the existing literature by revealing the relationship between tourism activities and women empowerment. This study indicated that CBT empowers rural women’s life significantly and it impacts women’s role in economy, society and social life along with their psychological capital. The qualitative approach using semi-structured interview process is utilized to collect the data. The interviewees were selected using the judgmental sampling approach of non-probability sampling method to ensure that each participant is from Karpaz region. The findings of this study yielded some vital insights that shed the lights on the associations between CBT and women empowerment as a result of active involvement of women in tourism activities. Despite the tangible and intangible challenges that women face throughout these activities, nevertheless, it is observed that CBT does not only improve the quality of life for women, but it also adds significant contribution to entire community. As a result, findings of this study indicate that women empowerment impacts the community’s economic and social life significantly. This study’s results offer significant implications for both researchers and practitioners including tourism developers to understand the differences between CBT and other branches of tourism.