The UNWTO Regional capacity building workshop on Tourism Policy and Strategy, organized in collaboration with the UNWTO.Themis Foundation and Qatar Tourism Authority, held in Doha (Qatar) was closed on 22 March 2012 by H.E. Mr. Ahmed Abdulla Al Nuaimi, Chairman of Qatar Tourism Authority.

This workshop, inaugurated on 18 March 2012 by H.E. Mr. Ahmed Abdulla Al Nuaimi, Chairman of Qatar Tourism Authority and Amr Abdel-Ghaffar, UNWTO Regional Director for the Middle East, was attended by 60 officials and experts from public and private sectors from Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Libya, Oman, Palestine, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

Delivered by the experts Ahmed El-Khadem and Edith Szivas, this workshop included technical visits and fieldwork on the Olympic Committee, the Aspire Zone, Katara and The Pearl Qatar. This UNWTO.Capacity initiative examined tourism policies, the creation of tourism development plans and the regulatory mechanisms and the application of these in a variety of locations throughout the World. It focused on issues raised by the need to ensure the triple bottom-line sustainable development of tourism (viz. economic, social and environmental) including evaluation of the impacts and the ways in which these find expression in policy, development and planning decisions in various settings. In doing this, the workshop also provided an understanding of the relationships and interactions between the public and private sectors in the development process and provided real solutions to the gaps and problems tourism officials may face.