November 2018
As part of our commitment to doubling our number of female tour leaders globally, Intrepid DMC Sri Lanka are offering eight scholarships in 2019 for women to obtain their national tour guiding licence.
As tour leading is not seen as a suitable career for women in many countries, increasing the number of female applicants has been a challenging task, necessitating identifying what the key barriers are and working to overcome them.
In Sri Lanka, tour leaders must gain a National Tour Guide Licence in order to lead trips. The course to obtain the licence takes six months and is conducted by the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. Getting a place in the course is highly competitive: enrolments are only open once a year, and hundreds of applications are received for only 50 spots.
Across Sri Lanka there are only 1500 licensed guides, yet only 50 are women.
“We tried lots of different ways to attract more licensed female leaders,” says Kosala Abeyratna, Intrepid DMC Sri Lanka Operations Manager. “However we quickly realised that the only way to improve the situation was to encourage more women to apply for the course.”
To this end, Intrepid DMC Sri Lanka is funding eight places in the course, with applications opening in April 2019 and has partnered with the Sri Lanka National Guide Institute to promote the opportunity and encourage women to apply.
“Once the women have completed the course in September, they will undertake our own specialist leader training, including a training trip, and then hopefully be running tours on their own for us in November,” says General Manager Anu Karunatilaka. “Our whole team are so excited about this initiative and can’t wait to welcome the new leaders.”