Investing in local communities is key to the long-term sustainability of tourism assets, including wildlife and conservation areas, while there is also a growing market of travellers that want to know that their experience has a positive impact. Tessa Reed reports.

Investing in communities is key to the protection and sustainable development of tourism assets. Peter John Massyn, CEO of Return Africa and one of the executive directors of the nonprofit organisation African Safari Foundation, suggests that communities have to benefit from conservation areas for those conservation areas to survive.

“Communities have to have a stake in conservation so that they have an incentive to conserve,” says Massyn. “The old approach of removing communities and putting up a fence and maintaining that barrier is in my view antiquated. We have to integrate local communities into conservation.”

This sentiment is shared by Leán Terblanche, Director of the Grootbos Foundation, who says: “Every business needs to invest in local communities to maintain a balance between the economy and ecosystems in society, but even more so businesses in tourism need to ensure sustainable destinations for generations to come.” Terblanche adds that other benefits include local economic development, improving the quality of life of employees their families and the broader community.

Massyn also suggests that community tourism projects have market appeal. “We’ve established a new company that uses this type of tourism as its differentiator – its unique selling point,” he says. “We believe that gives us an advantage in a market that we believe wants to see returns to local people and responsible forms of tourism.”

However, while tourism is seen as a tool for empowering communities, it is not necessarily a panacea for high levels of joblessness in areas where there are no attractions or infrastructure. For this reason, Kathy Bergs, General Manager at Fair Trade Tourism (FFT), suggests that the criteria for a community tourism project should match that of any tourism project.

For example she says, the success of the project will depend on elements such as the proximity of an attraction, the accessibility of the location as well as access to market. She points out that in instances where a location is remote, this challenge can be overcome through route development. “It’s unlikely you would go to this really beautiful extremely remote place - unless you have a private plane - for two or three nights, but you might go away for a week if there were maybe three places you could link up,” says Bergs.

Bergs emphasises that good intentions alone will not lead to a successful community tourism project. “There has to be a viable tourism product,” she says, adding that without the potential to attract tourists, a project can drain resources without becoming sustainable. She explains that it can be easier to create a product than to bring tourists. “You can create false expectations if people have been skilled to run a BnB or tea garden and they are sitting waiting for tourists that never come,” she adds.

The African Safari Foundation identifies community projects where communities have a right to land with high tourism potential, says Massyn. According to him, high tourism value and a cohesive community are critical to the success of these initiatives. “The projects that tend to fail are often identified by donors,” he says, adding that while these are driven by good motives, they do so without a thorough business case. “Most projects where communities try and run a business as a donor funded collective become white elephant, sadly.”

A tool for development

Community tourism can take various forms, be it a venture between a local community and a private investor or a fully community owned operation. Dave Martin, Founder of Bulungula Lodge, explains that community tourism can develop either through people in a community starting a tourism operation and gradually growing this, or, which is often the case in more remote areas, an external actor such as government, a non-government organisation or a private investor, sets up a community tourism operation in partnership with the local community.

Martin explains that using tourism as a tool for development, as opposed to generating a profit, has been the focus of Bulungula. “It is now a successful and sustainable community tourism project that is a 100% community owned.”

According to Martin, in instances where a third party is involved, they should be there for a very long time. The biggest mistake I have seen in other projects around the world is where people imagine they can just come in for two or three years and then it’s all gonna just run.” He suggests 10 years as a more realistic target.

Martin also emphasises that instead of bringing in skilled people from outside, people within the community should be empowered and trained to managerial roles. “In our case, this was a community that didn't have electricity, didn’t have running, didn’t even have a gravel road, or cellphone signal,” says Martin. “Many of the adults didn’t know how to use taps. Now, 10 years later, the lodge is 100% managed by people born and raised in the village and you’ve got high-end systems – water, energy, Internet banking.”

“It can be done, but you really need to put in the time and effort,” says Martin. “You can have people running a successful business provided you invest in them.”

Like Bergs and Massyn, he cautions against projects that rely too heavily on donor funding. “Many community tourism projects fail because they are started by government or NGOs with the best intentions, with relatively large amounts of money,” he says. He explains that these projects are often developed on high cost structures that are divorced from the income of the project. “When the big pot of money runs out, everything collapses.”

Martin advises that projects should be structured in a way that matches the income. “It’s much better to grow yourself and raise salaries starting from a low base, than to start on a high level and be forced to cut expenses when the donation runs out.”