There are a total of 40 local people involved and each family owns the accommodation on their land. This initiative has encompassed diverse activities such as secondary education, adult training, live fencing, reforestation, gender work, a youth group, organic farming methods, health and hygiene.
The eco-tourism programme has played a large part in opening people’s eyes to the beauty and value of our everyday natural environment, the need to protect and enhance, and how to do this in a recent strategy workshop. About 12-15 youth people from the community are actively training and working as ecoguides. They have just completed their Local Guides qualification with INTUR, the national tourism organization. Several of them have been learning English through the English speaking visitors and community eco-tourism project and can now guide in English. Some of them hope to gain entry to the National Guides course.
The programme includes a revolving micro-credit scheme through which members can make improvements to their facilities and their own standard of living. Currently there is a specific one for the purchase of solar panels and another experimenting with bios-mass fuel to replace wood for cooking. We have prevented further destruction of the area and actively encourage families to plant trees for forage, for shade grown organic coffee, for erosion control and for fruit.
Those involved with the programme have a better system of rubbish management, creating organic composts, learning from tourists that discarded non-biodegradable material is offensive and polluting. There is a plan to have an annual event with competitions for the best kept communities. There have been many achievements: reducing burning of land and deforestation. The greatest is probably a raising awareness of the value of our local environment.
This holiday is part of the responsibletravel.com and Conservation International Community Based Tourism Programme to support and promote community based tourism ventures that offer significant conservation and development benefits to local communities. To see other community based tourism holidays and find out more about the programme click here.
We invite every traveller who books a holiday via us to send in a review. Because we don't run the holidays they're completely independent and unedited... remember to read between the lines though, as two people on the same holiday can have different views!
