Pro-Poor Tourism
OUR MISSION: Tribal Voice Communications works with UK travel companies, destination tourism suppliers, local communities, conservation organisations and development NGOs to help make tourism a force for positive change – minimising the negative impacts of tourism on the environment, wildlife and local culture and harnessing the benefits to help conserve natural resources and improve the livelihoods of local communities in tourism destinations.
Maasai Villages Initiative, Kenya
Unbeknown to tourists, Kenya’s driver guides take back the fees they pay for cultural tours around Maasai villages, allowing the villages to retain just 4% of visitor tour fees.
In this way it is estimated that $5 million p.a. ‘leaks’ out of Maasai villages in Kenya.
Just imagine what the villages could do if they were able to retain this income.
Tribal Voice has worked with the Maasai villages in Kenya since 2006 along with tour operators, ground handlers and safari lodges linking the villages into the formal supply chain via a cashless ticketing system that ensures that the money that tourists pay to visit Maasai villages is paid directly into village bank accounts.
With no money changing hands in the villages, the driver guides can no longer pocket these fees.
All villages in the Mara Triangle (the Western side of the Masai Mara) now retain 100% of tourism revenues from lodge-generated village visits and this have brought about much development in these villages e.g. schools, rainwater harvesting systems, health care.
In March 2009, the initiative was expanded into the mass-market safari tourism area on the Narok side of the Masai Mara where 27 Maasai cultural manyattas operate. Tribal Voice is also working with the 9 Maasai villages in Northern Mara in order to replicate the system there. Amboseli and Samburu, the final areas in Kenya where village enterprises are being exploited, will hopefully follow when a funding source is secured to allow this.
The expansion of the initiative to the Narok side of the Mara faces huge resistance from Kenya’s driver guides who are trying by all means possible to disturb the implementation of the new cashless ticketing system in order to protect their ‘cash cow’.
Underhand tactics employed include informing visitors that there are anthrax and Ebola outbreaks in the villages and taking clients to remote Maasai villages that have never engaged in tourism previously, and can hence be easily exploited. Tribal Voice continues to work tirelessly with the Maasai and the tourism industry in the UK and Kenya to overcome these issues.
Useful Links & Downloads:
Sunday Observer article
A Priceless Lesson in Maasai Life
Times Online article
Briton Challenges Kenya Tourism Scam
World Travel Market’s 2008 Spotlight article She Who Helps
Report on Maasai Villages Initiative
High Five Club
Cheryl & Manny Mvula’s charity which empowers compassionate individuals to help change lives in Africa, £5 at a time. If you would like to join our club visit www.highfiveclub.co.uk
For further information contact Senior Consultant Dr Cheryl Mvula
Tribal Voice Communications Ltd. Company Registration No. 5578749
Tribal Voice specialises in pro-poor tourism development – forms of tourism that result in increased net benefits for poor.
Tourism can be a force for positive change in the developing world, but all too often the negative impacts on communities far outweigh the positive. Yet if community tourism enterprises can be linked into the formal supply chain in a responsible way, the benefits can be truly life transforming.
A case in point is Tribal Voice’s award winning Maasai Villages Initiative in Kenya, funded initially by the Travel foundation. This initiative has reversed over 30 years of exploitation of the Maasai villages’ tourism enterprises in Kenya (cultural manyattas) by the industry’s driver guides.