According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), Asia and the Pacific led worldwide growth in international tourism in 2016 with a record 308 million international tourist arrivals, constituting an increase of 9 per cent, or 24 million people over 2015, This is the highest increase recorded, in both relative and absolute terms, across the five UNWTO regions.1 The number of Spanish-speaking tourists visiting Asia also increased. Tour guides in the region realized that they need to learn Spanish to provide a better service to this new and growing market.

To address this need, in 2012, the Colombian Government introduced a cultural exchange programme for Asian tour guides and graduate and undergraduate students, providing them with the opportunity to come to Colombia to learn Spanish as a second language. The Colombian embassies in each country, as well as those of the participating countries and universities involved, are the main partners for recruiting interested students.

This initiative strengthens cultural exchange and international cooperation between Colombia and Asia2 by teaching Spanish as a foreign language and promoting Colombia’s linguistic, cultural and touristic values. It is also important for Asian tour guides to strengthen their interaction with Spanish-speaking tourists and offers Colombia a great opportunity to establish itself as a major destination to learn Spanish. The programme seeks to contribute to the achievement of SDG 8 as these exchanges create greater and better employment opportunities when tour guides return to their countries in Asia, which in turn generates greater economic growth for the tourism and hotel sector in the region.

The programme is developed in Colombian universities recognized as offering high- quality Spanish instruction. They offer a language course that lasts one academic semester (four months), with 15 hours of instruction per week. To provide beneficiaries with internationally recognized certification of their language proficiency, the International Service for the Evaluation of the Spanish Language (SIELE) exam is administered at the end of the course.

In addition to these academic activities, volunteer activities are promoted among Asian students, including volunteering 10 hours/week in community projects, which provides them a deeper understanding of Colombian society. This helps to achieve SDG 4 as the exchange students learn Spanish in high-quality educational institutions and also acquire valuable knowledge about social and political conditions in a Latin American country as complex as Colombia. This is highly innovative, since it is a new way to strengthen cooperation between two regions such as Eastern Asia and Latin America, characterized by developing countries with similar and complementary economic dynamics.

Due to the success of this initiative, interest in applying to the course is growing among Asian tour guides and students. Consequently, in 2017, the ELE Asia + initiative was created in order to extend the benefits of the ELE Focalae programme to other countries in the region, such as Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

Additionally, and as a complement to these two projects, the Colombian Government decided to incorporate the ELE in ASIA Competition, in which teachers from universities and learning centres that welcome scholars from the ELE Focalae and ELE Asia + initiatives can apply to teach a short Spanish course at a university in China, Indonesia, Thailand, or Viet Nam, thus strengthening their professional skills and knowledge of Asian culture. Moreover, cooperation agreements can be signed with their counterpart Asian universities.