RIYADH — The Ministry of Tourism has identified 15 programs to localize in the tourism sector, including six programs for small and medium enterprises. These programs included tourism scholarship program, training program that ends in employment, the applied training program, the Hafawa program, professional accreditation certificate program, the leadership preparation program, the executive education program, the e-tourism education platform, and the secondment training program." The targeted regions to implement the programs are Riyadh, Makkah, Qassim, Eastern Province, Hail and Najran. The number of Saudis working in the Kingdom's tourism sector accounts for 189,000. This constitutes 26 percent of the total 726,000 Saudi employees, according to Al-Watan newspaper. The ministry is in the process of contracting with a think-tank to manage and implement supportive programs to raise the percentage of Saudization in tourism activities in six regions of the Kingdom. The ministry had signed on February 3, 2021 a memorandum with the Human Resources Development Fund to link employment and training programs with a strategy that aims to provide facilities and support to the tourism sector through various programs between training and employment that meet the needs of the private sector. The tourism human capital development programs have also been launched, which is a national program to provide 100,000 jobs in the tourism sector for the year 2021, stemming from the ministry's strategy in developing human capital during the next ten years. This is also instrumental in enabling qualified national talent to fill up the vacancies in proportion to the needs of the tourism market. The programs also aim to contribute to achieving the goals of Vision 2030, as well as to qualifying and training Saudi youth to occupy jobs in the sector and thus bringing down unemployment levels. This is in addition to meeting the needs of the labor market in the local tourism sector with supplying qualified and competent Saudi hands. The tourism sector aims to raise its stake in the gross domestic product (GDP) to 5.3 percent in 2022 and about 10 percent in 2030. It also aims to have the number of domestic visits reach 32.5 million in 2022 and about 43 million in 2030, and the number of foreign visits to 29.5 million in 2022 and about 55 million in 2030.
