Festival in Mali

Festival in Mali

How this holiday makes a difference

Environment
We minimize our impact on the harsh environments we travel through. Our philosophy has been to leave only footprints and take only photographs. To reiterate this, every customer who travels with us receives an overview of our Responsible Travel Policy, to understand our environmentally sustainable principles, and outline how each customer can minimize their impact while travelling.

As we know the danger that nature faces to day we minimize domestic flights on our trip, most of the travelling is done on the ground. During our trip we do lot of camping in villages because they have not got big hotels to waste water and some of them use solar energy for their light. We encourage our clients to minimize waste by advising clients to follow the African example and recycle everything. You will see how a system that provides no waste disposal produces very little waste.

The root cause of Global Warming is society's dependence on emission creating fossil fuel. Planting trees is not going to reverse this trend or cancel our carbon emissions very quickly or effectively. We believe the way to reduce these dependencies is to create clean energy production. Therefore, we support renewable energy projects like wind and solar power and the gold standard setter in effective, meaningful action addressing climate change. So, while we believe that tree planting can play a small role in greenhouse gas abatement, we have gone the extra mile in promoting a longer term solution because our countries are deserts and planting trees will be good for the population.

We also help a bee protection organization in Ségou named (GIPA). They try to advice local people not to use fire to obtain honey. We provide them with vehicles during their trip to inform local people how they could get honey without killing the bees, as in our society they use fire to kill bees to get their honey.

Community
Life for the majority of Malians people is difficult, especially in this region. Timbuktu is amongst the poorest areas of the country, depending largely on a few rains fed subsistence agriculture, camel farming and breeding. The festival of the desert is a great means to ameliorate the living conditions of these people. When you take this trip, you will contribute to the development of this barren land, the festival entry fees, which organise by local people and with your others purchases, the region can plant trees and with the festival, that region can also have big projects to plant a lot of tree. Every year our government uses means to secure this festival, which is a real development for this poor region.

By supporting local festival projects and benefiting the local economy, we encourage the continuation and protection of the local culture, history and traditions of these communities. This festival is also a project that benefits the whole community of Timbuktu (artisan, camel owners, hotels and guesthouses owners, local guides so on), which encourages them to protect the festival. By booking this tour, a percentage of our profits go towards establishing our community development programme plan for the future, which will concentrate on vital requirements such as clean water, plantings trees, the building of schools and medical centres in remote areas of Mali. Because we know that clean water and medical centres are not found or available in most of the villages, and most of the villages still lack a school.

We employ local guides, drivers and cooks during all our tours, and where possible we source supplies from the local communities and aim to use local businesses wherever possible. We encourage our guests to purchase goods and souvenirs locally. We use local accommodation, hotels and guesthouses owned by local people. By supporting the Festival In The Desert you are also helping to promote the quality and diversity of Malian music to an international audience.

Festival in Mali