Alain St.Ange from the Seychelles confirms his presence in Madrid for FITUR next week where he will be lodging his documents for the coming elections for the position of Secretary General of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO)

Alain St.Ange has confirmed he is a World Tourism Organisation Secretary General Candidate. The Former Seychelles Minister of Tourism, Civil Aviation, Ports and Marine was born on 24 October 1954 on the island of La Digue where he spent much of his youth on his family’s agricultural estate, primarily dedicated to vanilla and coconut plantations, before pursuing his formal education at the Seychelles College in Mahé. He later continued his studies in Hotel Management in Germany and Tourism in France.

Afterwards, St.Ange held several positions in the hospitality field throughout Seychelles, the Channel Islands and Australia, eventually managing key properties in Seychelles and ending his resort management days with the Denis Private Island. In addition to his extensive experience in the hospitality industry, St.Ange’s upbringing led him into politics as his father, Karl St.Ange, was an influential political figure during the early years of Seychelles independence. 

In 1979, St.Ange was elected as a Member of the People’s Assembly for the La Digue Constituency for the Seychelles People’s Progressive Front. In 2002, he was elected as a Member of the National Assembly for the Bel Air Constituency for the Seychelles National Party. Following that, he was appointed as the Seychelles Director of Marketing in 2009, and in 2010, promoted to CEO of the Seychelles Tourism Board. 

In 2012, St.Ange was elected as the first President of the Indian Ocean Vanilla Islands Regional Organisation, an affiliation comprised of island nations (Seychelles, Mauritius, Reunion, Madagascar, Comoros & Mayotte) within the Indian Ocean, aimed at forming a new tourism destination brand. That same year, he was also named by then Seychelles President, James Michel, as the Minister of Tourism and Culture. In 2013, under his leadership as Minister of Tourism and Culture, the Seychelles candidacy was unanimously approved and elected by the commission of the Africa region (CAF) as member of the Executive Council of the United Nations world Tourism Organization with the term ending in 2017.

St.Ange has received numerous awards and honours, including the Mahatma Gandhi Honour Award (2014) for his work in strengthening Indo-Seychelles relations, a Plaque of Honour from the House of Lords in London (2015), and most recently, the Tourism Eminent Achiever Award in Africa (2015). He has also authored and co-authored several books about Seychelles, including: 

Seychelles, What Next? (1991); Seychelles, In Search of Democracy (2005); Seychelles, The Cry of a People (2007); Seychelles, Regatta 2010 (2010); Seychelles, Enters The World of Canival (2011); Seychelles, Remembers Karl St.Ange (2011); Seychelles, The Coco-de-Mer (2012); Seychelles, Festival of the Sea (2012); Seychelles, State House (2013) and Seychelles: Unexpected Treasures (2014).

St.Ange is married to Ginette Michel of Les Mamelles, Mahé and has two daughters, Christine and Michelle.

For more information, please visit the official website of Alain St.Ange

At the start of the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development I want to pose a seemingly ridiculous question – “Can you have too much of a good thing”? 

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) stand as one of the greatest achievements of our time – the culmination of more than half a century of increasing collective commitment to a fairer more equitable world, based on economic, social and environmental sustainability. An evolving, 15 year, locally led framework of 17 global SDGs, with 169 targets and 304 Indicators that addresses every aspect of life and the planet.

The SDGs have been cleverly designed to galvanize regional, national, and local stakeholders to make their own responses – for air, oceans, land, cities, industries, rural communities, indigenous people etc. Each with their own vision of the priorities, and version of the action needed. That means trillions of personal, corporate, NGO and government actions must start changing all over the planet: each calibrated to its own circumstance, ambition, and pace of change. Ultimately it will transform all production, consumption, and investment.

I would argue however, that one of these 17 Goals stands out from the rest – namely Goal 13 Climate Change – and for the simple reason that it is existential. Existential means that life on the planet is fundamentally threatened.  Without a fix, future generations will freeze or fry. And the intensifying impacts of extreme climate will severely aggravate many other SDG challenges. Which is why, the Paris Agreement with its 2050 national carbon reduction targets must be implemented now and intensified every 5 years for several decades.

For this year, the focus of the world’s largest industrial activity Travel & Tourism will be on how to link its sustainable development strategies with the SDGs. At the same time adapting to the alignment that the rest of humanity is making, for moral, business and social reasons. We will see new conferences, declarations, indicators, and coalitions; engaging public, private and civil society stakeholders. The entire year has been conceived and constructed to intensify and accelerate the Travel & Tourism intersect with all the SDGs and the scope and scale of the UN’s IYSTD Resolution is massive.  And rightly so – to be a real force for good, we have to be up with the mainstream curve on building sustainability into all our growth aspirations.

And it is here that my question becomes clearer – how to keep existential Climate Resilience front and centre in our sector, in a year when Travel & Tourism sustainability is everyone’s flavour of the month and where all of humanity’s agenda is shifting to all of the SDGs. And how to make sure, going forward, that our sectoral approach to climate response tracks the ever-increasing existential demands of the Paris accords, as well as bridging the gaps between national/ international, global/local, and science/operational, that will be at the core of real change.

We believe SUN (a legacy program for Maurice Strong one of the great architects of Sustainable Development) will help, by its total focus on the intersect of existential Climate Change with the response and resilience of the Travel &Tourism Sector.

After several years of planning, the proof of concept SUN Centre will be launched in 2017 in the National Park in Limburg, Belgium – supported by local community stakeholders. It’s planned as the European hub of a global network of prefabricated, solar powered, cloud connected centres – focused on community climate resilience and travel.

There will be many aspects of the SUN experiment to set in place during 2017 – sourcing online data feeds, good practice and innovation: building links with the local community – particularly schools who we expect to be regular visitors: as well as preparing for platform content curation, global network operations and the like.  

Our core collaborators are multidisciplinary and global, with lifetimes of commitment to Sustainability, Mobility, Tourism, Parks, Conservation and Infrastructure development – inside and outside the sector – see www.thesunprogram.com

We will work, at Board level, to ensure closest integration with the Hoge Kempen National Park through its ground-breaking environmentalist Director Ignace Schops who commissioned the Centre with us; as well as with the University of Hasselt Field Research Centre and its UNFCCC linked “Ecotron” Climate Research Program.  Ignace’s vision as President of Europarc Federation will be an important point of focus for us, his concept of “Re-Connection, nature and community together, as well as his sustainability links as a Goldman award winner, Ashoka Fellow, Gore Ambassador and long-time IUCN member.

We will build on the relationship of SUN co-founder Felix Dodds with the UN Sustainable Development Goal Community, where he has been one of the key civil society architects – his recent book “Negotiating the SDGs” sets out a vision of their potential impacts and operations. Our collaboration goes back nearly 2 decades, cemented by a shared belief in the sustainable development philosophy of our friend and mentor Maurice Strong.

Tom Goldberg MBE, the Chair of the SUN-ARK company, former M.D. of global construction giant Atlas Ward, will bring the essential dimension of prefabricated building, solar power and efficient energy to our team. And I will reach out from my 4 decades of contacts in the sector with IATA, WTTC, UNWTO, WEF and now ICTP, to draw on worldwide thinking in this field.

We are determined that this will be a financially sustainable program and we know that there are fellow believers who see both the business and moral importance of the multi-decade transformation. We want to  build long term relationships, not simply marketing plays.

But much as I believe that the SUN system will be a useful building block in the Climate Response of the “Travelism” ecosystem, there is still that nagging unanswered question of keeping the focus on the eXistential element of climate resilience amidst all the positive vibes of the SDG and the Tourism for Sustainable Development institutional enthusiasm of 2017.

For this reason, we will host a Strong Reflexion event in the fall of 2017 for the sole purpose of reviewing the intersect of existential Climate Change with the response and resilience of the Travel & Tourism Sector. It will coincide with the inauguration of the Limburg SUN Centre and will build on the experience of similar events held in recent years – including the IUCN led Strong Event prior to the Copenhagen COP.

We will also publish a new SUN “Existential Blog” monthly, to prepare for this event and to raise awareness afterwards – it will incorporate a wide range of views.

Last, but not least we will reflect this existential dimension in all our messaging, because if we don’t act now and keep acting, one day soon it will be too late.

Prof. Geoffrey Lipman

For further information on SUN, please visit: http://www.thesunprogram.com/

SUN – the Strong Universal Network – is a new movement to respond to existential climate change and supports the intensifying 2050 carbon targets of the Paris Agreement.  It is a legacy of the late Maurice Strong, the visionary who led many historical sustainable development initiatives, including the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. He was a champion of climate resilience and green travel.

We are spearheading SUN to underscore the reality of climate change and the imperative of rapid, continuous response.

We advocate Impact-Travel – with green growth at the core; all impacts measured for sustainable management and long-range, local development paramount. But our focus in the evolving myriad of sustainable development goals (SDG) targets will be climate resilience.

We are developing an out-of-the-box, solar-powered, web-connected support system that every community can readily access, to shape climate adaptation through Impact-Travel. The global center will launch in 2017 in the Hoge Kempen National Park in Belgium, linked to Hasselt University’s Science Research Unit.  We will expand the network to cover all UN regions in 2018, with global deployment for 2020.

Our centers and national nodes will become a new source of climate resilience facts, presentations, analytics, and innovation, with an emphasis on universities and national parks.

SUN is supported and managed by a Belgian Green Growth & Travelism Institute (GGTI) with a small management team and likeminded committed partners around the world. It has been financed by its founders to start up.

For more information, visit thesunprogram.com

The author, Professor Geoffrey Lipman, is the co-founder of SUN and President of the International Coalition of Tourism Partners (ICTP), a travel and tourism coalition of global destinations committed to quality service and green growth. For more information and to become a member of ICTP for free, visit ictp.travel.

What is hidden from what is already obvious in the race for the next UNWTO Secretary general?

Candidates are heading to Madrid during the upcoming FITUR to introduce themselves, and specifically in Africa, the fight for Africa is becoming unpredictable.

The current Secretary General, Dr Taleb Rifai – a Jordanian national – has held the post for the past seven years and is due to step down at the end of 2017. Elections for the post are due to take place during the UNWTO Executive Council meeting scheduled to be held in Madrid in mid-May, 2017. Widely respected for his leadership of the Organisation, Dr Rifai is seen as a unifying figure whose legacy rests on the slow but steady rise in the profile and indeed the impact of tourism as a vehicle for the promotion of understanding between peoples and cultures.

SADC member states – including Seychelles – unanimously endorsed Dr. Mzembi’s (Zimbabwe) candidature in March 2016. African Heads of State and Government, meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, in July 2016, added their own unanimous endorsement of Dr. Mzembi, who thus became Africa’s candidate for UNWTO.

Dr. Mzembi last week got competition. Entering the race is the former minister of tourism for the Republic of Seychelles, Alain St. Ange. Mr. St.Ange resigned as the minister of his country on December 28 to concentrate on his UNWTO campaign.

Earlier in 2016 Mr. Ange was one of the first voicing interest in the UNWTO post but backed out many months ago. His political party lost the election in the Seychelles, but the popular and outspoken Mr. St.Ange was able to maintain his minister post and even expanded to include aviation and marines. At the same time, the Hon. Walter Mzembi went full steam traveling the globe successfully campaigning.

With three or four other expected candidates from Europe and Latin America, there is no unity in that part of the world, and if anyone from Europe or Latin America wants to win, splitting up African votes would definitely help.

The importance of Africa and the ambitions at that time by South Korea to treat Africans well was very much a factor when Taleb Rifai was elected.

Although there is no officially recognised system of regional rotation when it comes to filling the post of UNWTO Secretary-General, there has emerged a general sense of understanding that, given the right candidate, Africa – which has never held the top post before- could be well-placed to assume leadership of the Organisation and to take it to new heights of consequence and recognition within the broad United Nations family.

Both Latin America and Europeans already served as the UNWTO Secretary General.

So far the highest UNWTO post was held by:
France Robert Lonati 1975–1985
Austria Willibald Pahr 1986–1989
Mexico Antonio Enriquez Savignac 1990–1996
France Francesco Frangialli 1997–2009
Jordan Taleb Rifai 2010–Present

An article just published in the London Evening News commented on the surprise move of former minister of tourism for the Seychelles to enter the race. In so doing, and should he receive the official endorsement of his government, he and his government will be openly breaking ranks with the 15-member Southern African Development Community (SADC) and 54-member African Union (AU), both of which have long ago endorsed a single candidate to carry Africa’s bid to win this coveted post.

Indications by several sources may paint a picture of other political forces outside Africa to encourage both African candidates to run for the UNWTO post.

Seychelles and Zimbabwe: Both men are highly motivated and qualified to bring a breeze of fresh air into the UNWTO establishment. Unless any of the two enjoy an enormous support outside Africa against the 3 or 4 already in the race from outside the black continent, it would be a tough fight.

Maybe this is what UNWTO and the other candidates from Georgia, Brazil and possibly Mexico like to hear.

In May 2016, the UNWTO Secretary General put the Executive Director for Operational Programs and Institutional Relations, Márcio Favilla Lucca de Paula from Brazil, second in charge of UNWTO.

As it was expected by many, Marcio Favilla is now one of the contenders endorsed by his home country Brazil.

One may look a step further and analyze where the second powerful organization representing the largest 100 private members in the global travel and tourism industry has more interests in. When asked by eTN, the President & CEO of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) David Scowsill responded:

“Public comments on the selection process for the next Secretary General for UNWTO and on the merits of individual candidates are not matters for WTTC.”

The question is what could have been said – not in public. There is a lot going on, and we’re entering exciting times.

If Gloria Guevara from Mexico decides to enter the race, she worked for Sabre Travel Network and Sabre Holdings for 15 years in a variety of positions. She was based in Mexico City, then Coral Gables Florida, where she had regional responsibilities and worked for the Latin America and the Caribbean region, and later held global responsibilities as Vice President for Customer Solutions and Vendor Management in the Information Office in the Sabre headquarter in Southlake Texas. Gloria was also the CEO of Sabre de Mexico, a joint venture between Aeromexico, Mexicana, and Sabre holdings, where she was reporting to the board of directors. Sabre is a prominent member at WTTC, holding an Executive Committee seat. Even though Gloria Guevara is no longer with Sabre and operates her own consulting firm in Florida, is there an expectation or connection? True, so far she is not a candidate.

Two candidates will be clashing with their launch event in Madrid on January 19.
Marcio Favilla and Walter Mzembi are competing at 7.00pm during FITUR to get supporters attend their launch. The Zimbabwe event was moved due to a conflict with Spain, the host of FITUR.

Two candidates are now also competing to get their supporters to their Madrid event are inviting 19.00h, January 19:

Marcio Favilla: Brazilian Embassy, Calle Fernando El Santo, 6, Madrid
Eng. Walter Mzembi: Torre de Cristal Planta 3I, Paseo de la Castellana, 259.28046 Madrid.

Zurab Pololikashvili, Ambassador of Georgia to Spain already had his launch event in Madrid attended by Taleb Rifai

Splitting up Africa is risky, and brings a new element into the already very difficult race.

The African Union-endorsed candidate for the post of Secretary General of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation –  UNWTO –  Dr Walter Mzembi, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Tourism and the Hospitality Industry, and the current Chairperson of the UNWTO Regional Commission for Africa, is set to formally launch his candidature at a landmark reception event to be held in Madrid, Spain on 19 January, 2017.

The UNWTO has its Headquarters in Madrid. Invited guests include representatives of all UNWTO Member States, the Secretary-General of the UNWTO and all Executive Directors of the Organisation, as well as senior representatives of the Spanish Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Tourism.

The reception will take place at the prestigious Torre de Cristal, in the Four Towers central business district of downtown Madrid.

Unanimously endorsed by African Heads of State and Government at the AU Summit held in Kigali, Rwanda in July, 2016, Dr Mzembi thus assumed the mantle of Africa’s candidate for the top UNWTO post –  a position which has never before been held by an African.

In its confirmatory letter of endorsement, addressed to the Secretary-General of the UNWTO, the African Union Commission stated that:

“ It is the firm conviction of African Heads of State and Government  –  as evidenced by their unanimous endorsement of Dr Mzembi’s candidature – that he has the qualifications, skills and competence, the vision and, equally as important, the drive and passion to successfully build on the remarkable legacy bequeathed to global tourism by His Excellency Dr Rifai, and to lead the Organisation and global tourism to new heights of relevance, recognition and results  –  tourism being an effective vehicle for sustainable development, the building of deeper understanding between peoples and cultures and for the reinforcement of the quest for greater global harmony and peace”.

Dr. Mzembi has served as Zimbabwe’s Minister of Tourism and the Hospitality Industry since 2009.  Prior to that, he held various positions in both the public and private sectors in Zimbabwe and internationally  –  including heading the Zimbabwe delegation to the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly for three consecutive years.

He has represented his country on the UNWTO Executive Council and is currently serving his second consecutive term as Chairperson of the UNWTO’s Regional Commission for Africa.

Dr. Mzembi has a long-standing, deep and abiding passion for tourism in all its many facets, as well as a well-defined and clearly articulated vision for the future development of the global tourism industry under the umbrella of the UNWTO.

The launch event in Madrid will provide an appropriate opportunity and platform for Dr Mzembi to outline his vision and to provide an overview of how, if elected Secretary General, he intends to lead the UNWTO to those “new heights of relevance, recognition and results”.

For more information on Dr. Mzembi also see: http://www.waltermzembi.org/

Worldtourism Wire readers and media interested to attend please email: [email protected]