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GENEVA, Switzerland — Jamaica Tourism Minister Hon. Edmund Bartlett used his World Economic Forum address in Geneva to present Jamaica’s Tourism 3.0 strategy and call for a proposed US$10 billion Global Tourism Resilience Fund, positioning tourism as a central driver of economic development, resilience, jobs and prosperity for communities.

The final conclusion for his presentation in Geneva:

The promise we must keep

Friends, the ultimate measure of this work will be found far from this room.

It will be found in the farmer who plants with confidence because a market is within reach. In the young professional who can build a career at home. In the worker who can face retirement with dignity. In the island community that can withstand a storm without surrendering its future.

These are the lives our decisions must serve.

Jamaica offers its experience. Tourism 3.0 offers a framework. A Global Tourism Resilience Fund can help provide the protection that progress requires.

Let us place tourism at the nucleus of development, and let us place human dignity at the heart of tourism.

Let the prosperity we create reach further than the visitor travels. Let it remain in the community. Let it endure through the crisis. Let it open a future for the child who will inherit the destination.

That is the promise before us. Let us give it the institutions, the investment and the resolve it deserves.

Bartlett, a leading international advocate for tourism resilience, urged global institutions, governments and investors to view tourism not simply through visitor arrivals and earnings, but through its impact on workers, local businesses, agriculture, communities and economic security. He also called on the World Economic Forum to help convene a founding coalition for the proposed resilience fund and to bring tourism more prominently into global discussions on climate resilience, food security, decent work and investment.Bartlett’s central message was unmistakable:

“Tourism belongs at the nucleus of global development.”

Bartlett wants the world to think bigger about tourism

For Bartlett, the tourism economy does not begin at an airport and end at a resort.

It includes the farmer planting food for hotels, the construction worker building tourism infrastructure, the musician preserving culture, the entrepreneur investing family savings and the young person developing the skills needed to participate in a global service economy.

That human supply chain formed the foundation of his World Economic Forum address.

“When tourism succeeds in the fullest sense,” Bartlett said, “the farmer gains a dependable buyer, the worker gains a future, and the community gains the means to improve its own life.”

It is a philosophy that helps explain Bartlett’s evolution from tourism minister into one of the sector’s persistent international advocates for resilience.

Rather than simply selling Jamaica, he has repeatedly sought to get governments, international institutions, academia and the private sector to reconsider how tourism fits into the larger architecture of development. In Geneva, that global-thinking approach was unmistakable.

Tourism 3.0: Jamaica as a working laboratory

Bartlett’s message was not that Jamaica has solved every tourism problem.

In fact, his address explicitly acknowledged that more work remains to be done, including ensuring benefits reach more communities and measuring who gains, who remains excluded and how well Jamaica’s tourism institutions perform when tested.

But Jamaica, he argued, has accumulated enough practical experience to offer the world something worth examining.

The concept is Tourism 3.0. Its premise is to move beyond measuring tourism primarily through arrivals, hotel rooms and gross earnings.

Bartlett wants the question to become: How much development does each visitor help create?

Jamaica’s Tourism 3.0 strategy seeks to connect agriculture, manufacturing, culture, technology and other domestic capabilities more closely with the visitor economy, with greater local ownership and stronger national prosperity as the objective.

That represents an important shift in how tourism success is defined. Visitor arrivals still matter. Investment matters. Tourism earnings matter.

But Bartlett argues those statistics alone cannot answer some of the industry’s most important questions: Who supplies tourism? Who owns the businesses? What security does a tourism worker gain? What burden does tourism place on communities? And how much of the economic progress created by tourism survives the next crisis?

Jamaica has been building the pieces

Tourism 3.0 is not being presented simply as a theoretical exercise.

Bartlett pointed to a series of Jamaican initiatives developed and expanded over the past decade as evidence of how the philosophy can work in practice.

Among them is the Tourism Workers Pension Scheme, supported by legislation in 2019 and launched in 2022, which gives retirement security an institutional place within Jamaica’s visitor economy and includes eligible self-employed workers.

There is also the Jamaica Centre of Tourism Innovation, which the Ministry reported had trained and certified more than 25,000 workers, linking professional qualifications with career development and opportunities for advancement.

For Bartlett, this is part of making tourism work for the people who make tourism possible.

“The person who spends a working life caring for visitors deserves to approach later life with security,” he said.

Connecting the Jamaican farmer with the visitor economy

Another critical element of Bartlett’s Tourism 3.0 philosophy is keeping more tourism expenditure within Jamaica.

The Tourism Linkages Networkprovides local suppliers with a practical connection to tourism demand, while its Agri-Linkages Exchange, known as ALEX, connects Jamaican farmers with hotels and other buyers.

According to the figures presented by Bartlett, ALEX facilitated more than J$450 million in produce sales during 2024. That is more than a tourism statistic.

A hotel buying Jamaican agricultural products can support the next planting by a farmer, income for a rural household and additional economic activity in the surrounding community.

This is the multiplier effect Bartlett wants Tourism 3.0 to strengthen.

Jamaica is also advancing its Local Firstagenda, intended to increase Jamaican participation as suppliers, owners and earners within the tourism economy, while work is progressing on arrangements for a Tourism Supply Logistics Centre to address practical barriers between local producers and major tourism buyers.

Innovation must also be Jamaican

Bartlett’s vision extends beyond traditional tourism businesses.

The Tourism Innovation Incubatoris intended to give Jamaican entrepreneurs a route to develop tourism products and technology.

Artificial intelligence and digital platforms are also part of that conversation.

But Bartlett’s argument is that technological advancement should translate into greater productivity and opportunity for workers and entrepreneurs rather than simply becoming another technology imported by the tourism sector.

Under Tourism 3.0, Jamaica’s ambition is for Jamaicans to own more of the solutions their tourism industry uses.

World Economic Forum Taps Edmund Bartlett to Put Tourism Resilience on the Global Economic Agenda

From Jamaica to the global resilience movement

Perhaps no issue has become more closely associated internationally with Edmund Bartlett than tourism resilience.

The Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre (GTRCMC), headquartered at The University of the West Indies in Jamaica, was established in 2019 to give tourism resilience a permanent institutional home through research, training and practical crisis-management knowledge.

Jamaica also took the resilience agenda onto the international stage through its leadership in establishing the United Nations observance of Global Tourism Resilience Day.

These initiatives have helped move resilience from an abstract tourism concept toward an institutional agenda.

But in Geneva, Bartlett pushed that agenda significantly further.

His argument was that research, preparation and knowledge are essential — but when a crisis actually strikes, vulnerable tourism economies also need access to money.

Bartlett proposes a US$10 billion Global Tourism Resilience Fund

This was the big-ticket proposal of the World Economic Forum address.

Bartlett renewed his call for a Global Tourism Resilience Fund, with a dedicated window for Small Island Developing States and other highly tourism-dependent economies.

He proposed a mobilisation ambition of US$10 billion, built in stages, and invited international partners to begin designing and capitalising such a facility. The proposed fund would have three financing windows.

The first would focus on prevention, potentially financing resilient infrastructure, early-warning systems, business preparedness and protection of natural assets such as reefs and mangroves.

A second would provide rapid assistance after a shock, helping eligible tourism workers and smaller businesses bridge interruptions in earnings and helping essential services remain operational.

The third would support resilient recovery, so destinations do not simply rebuild what was destroyed but reduce their vulnerability to the next crisis.

Bartlett envisages funding coming from a combination of public contributions, development finance, philanthropy and willing private-sector partners across the global travel economy.

Importantly, the US$10 billion is a proposed mobilisation ambition, not money already committed.

The speech makes clear that capital commitments, governance, eligibility rules and the institutional home for such a fund would have to be agreed with international partners. No endorsement by the World Economic Forum or international financial institutions is implied.

That distinction is important. But so is the scale of Bartlett’s ambition.

He is attempting to move the tourism resilience debate beyond conferences, declarations and academic research and into the world of development finance.

Why small islands need a different approach

For Small Island Developing States, Bartlett argues, tourism vulnerability has consequences far beyond hotels.

An island may depend on a small number of airports and ports. Hotels, businesses, communities and homes can occupy the same vulnerable coastline. International air connections are largely outside a small island’s control.

And when a hurricane shuts down a hotel, the economic damage travels inland.

A farmer loses an order. A driver loses income. A family may postpone a school expense. Government revenue can decline precisely when demand for government assistance increases.

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the same vulnerability on a global scale, when international tourist arrivals collapsed and tourism-dependent communities suddenly lost their principal market.

Bartlett distilled the problem into one powerful sentence:

“Small islands should never have to face risks of global origin with resources of local scale.”

A direct challenge to the World Economic Forum

Bartlett did not travel to Geneva simply to deliver another tourism speech.

He gave the World Economic Forum an agenda.

He asked the WEF to use its global convening power to place tourism more firmly within wider discussions about development.

He wants tourism’s connections with climate resilience, food security, decent work and investmentto have a sustained place in the core conversations at Davos.

Bartlett also called for a rigorous examination of Jamaica’s Tourism 3.0 experience involving international partners and independent expertise, with the objective of developing an adaptable guide for governments and investors.

And perhaps most significantly, he asked the World Economic Forum to help convene a founding coalition for the Global Tourism Resilience Fund.

His target is concrete: bring destinations together with those who invest in tourism, benefit from tourism trade and finance its future, and seek a design mandate and initial expressions of support at Davos 2027.

Alongside that initiative, Bartlett proposed advancing a compact for tourism workers built around recognised skills, retirement security and fair opportunity.

A Jamaican tourism minister thinking globally

This is where the Geneva address says something larger about Edmund Bartlett.

For years, Jamaica’s tourism minister has operated not only as the minister responsible for one of the Caribbean’s most recognizable destinations, but increasingly as a global thinker, mover and shaker seeking to shape the international tourism conversation.

His approach has been to take challenges confronting Jamaica and other tourism-dependent economies, develop institutions and policy responses around them, and then bring those ideas into international forums.

Tourism resilience is perhaps the clearest example.

What started as an urgent concern for destinations vulnerable to hurricanes, economic shocks, pandemics and other disruptions has evolved into an international conversation involving academia, governments, tourism leaders and multilateral institutions.

Tourism 3.0 represents the next stage of Bartlett’s thinking.

The objective is no longer simply making tourism more resilient. It is about asking what tourism is ultimately for.

Jamaica as a proof of concept

Bartlett describes Jamaica as a working proof of concept rather than a finished model.

That distinction matters.

Jamaica can point to a functioning tourism workers’ pension scheme, certified workers, farmers selling produce into the tourism economy through a digital exchange and an institution specifically dedicated to tourism resilience.

But Bartlett himself acknowledges that Local First still has to deliver on its promise, benefits need to reach more communities and Jamaica needs to continue measuring who gains and who remains excluded.

His invitation to the international community is therefore unusual in its openness:

• Study Jamaica.
• Examine the mechanisms.
• Test the results.
• Learn from its difficulties as well as its achievements.
• Then adapt what works to the circumstances of other countries.

“Our proposition,” Bartlett told the Forum, “is that a small island can contribute a model of development with global relevance.”

Beyond visitor arrivals

For decades, tourism destinations have celebrated record visitor arrivals. Bartlett is proposing a more demanding scoreboard.

Under the international application of Tourism 3.0 outlined in his address, destinations could report publicly on local value retained, worker security, community benefit, environmental performance and recovery capability, alongside traditional measurements such as arrivals and tourism earnings.

It changes the question from:

How many tourists came?to:

What did tourism actually do for the destination and its people?

• That means asking whether a farmer gained a sustainable market.
• Whether a young professional can build a career without leaving home.
• Whether a tourism worker can retire with dignity.
• Whether small businesses can participate in tourism prosperity.
• Whether local communities benefit from tourism investment.
• And whether an island can absorb the next shock without surrendering years of economic progress.

Bartlett brings a big idea from a small island to Geneva

For Jamaica, Bartlett’s World Economic Forum intervention is therefore about considerably more than international visibility for its tourism industry.

It positions the country as a contributor to the global debate over what the next generation of tourism should look like.

Tourism 3.0 remains a work in progress.

The Global Tourism Resilience Fund remains a proposal requiring partners, financing, governance and an institutional home.

But major international initiatives have to begin somewhere.

Bartlett has put a substantial proposition on the global table: judge tourism not simply by how many people arrive, but by what remains after they leave.

• Does the farmer have a market?
• Does the worker have a career and retirement security?
• Does the entrepreneur have an opportunity to own part of the industry?
• Can the community withstand the next hurricane, pandemic or economic shock?
• And does tourism create prosperity that remains in the destination?

Bartlett ended his address by bringing the argument back to the people tourism is ultimately supposed to serve:

“Let us place tourism at the nucleus of development, and let us place human dignity at the heart of tourism.” It is an ambitious message from a small Caribbean nation with an outsized voice in the international tourism conversation.

Edmund Bartlett went to Geneva not simply to promote Jamaica as a destination.

He went with a Jamaican idea he wants the world to examine, debate — and ultimately help build.