Tourism has now emerged to be among number one service industry contributing to millions of jobs worldwide, simulating local economy, generating foreign exchange earnings and has a far multiplier effect. In Zanzibar, tourism emerged as supplementing economic activity in 1984 following the dramatic declining of the clove price in the world market. As a result foreign investment started to pour in and the scramble for the best site for the development of resorts was eminent. There was no proper planning of what to be done no clear policy guidelines, procedures to be geared to, no infrastructure no even institutional responsible for tourism development and a boom wrongly started by surprise ignoring other sectors particularly the community where large percentages of members are children. The children in the tourist areas find themselves in dilemma as most of them are employed in the non-professional job where they are just selling their manpower in return of few dollars a month. Some children runaway from schools to work in the resorts, others are alien their traditional jobs such as fishing farming and are now converted into wageworkers. 

Worries among parents that their children imitate foreign culture are almost in all tourist zones as the traditionally family interactions are adversely affected. However, tourism might not stand alone, no one knows for sure how the so-called modern communication-the television magazines, Internet and so forth are affecting these children. To our understanding no research has been done to address these issues. This research proposal aims at finding the social-economic and cultural effects of tourism on youth and children in Zanzibar. 

The study will establish participation of child and youth in tourism industry, the influence of tourism on school performance and truancy, behavioral changes of child and youth in tourism dominated areas, child and youth social-economic gain associated with tourism and assessing policy, regulations and laws of child and youth rights. 

This study will be carried out in Unguja and Pemba islands focusing mainly on seven tourist dominated areas. Two reference sites, one from each island will be deliberately selected for investigations It will adopt descriptive survey approach in evaluating impact of tourism on youth and children in Zanzibar. The approach allows the use of multiple methods of data collection which will include documentary review, interview and observations. Those multiplicities of techniques will help in providing detected information from respondents and actual setting of tourism operation in Zanzibar. Stratified sampling techniques will be employed on the selected study sites to select the main target study populations which are parents/ Parents/ guardians, Policy makers, Child/youth and Teachers/instructors. Inclusion of these population based on the fact that they are the major stake holders and concern of the problem in hand

Data collected will be analyzed using qualitative techniques. Tape recording of FGDs and individual interviews will, on occasion, be fully transcribed and analyzed, depending on the themes that will emerge from listening to the proceedings. The quantitative information of the research will be statistically analyzed using of SPSS, SigmaPlot, or EPI-INFO.

Upon completion study will enhance our knowledge on the size of the problem and to make suggestions on appropriate strategies harmonizing effect and benefit associated with tourism.