Arusha conference 2008

Cultural Tourism and Development

In terms of African adventures the Livingstone Tanzania Trust is not interested in the Big 5, just the Big 1 – People We seek to tackle poverty in the community by providing meaningful, applicable, sustainable and replicable education facilities, educating both children and adults alike to give them the knowledge and the skills to work their own way out of poverty and live a full life.

By poverty we mean lack of disposable income, lack of access to resources such as education, clean water, health care, and poor resilience.  We are an embryonic and evolving charity, we dont claim to have all the answers, but we are trying a home grown development model which combines development, tourism and entrepreneurial flair.

Babati is a growing town, 200 km from Arusha and was in 2004 made the capital of the newly formed Manyara region and so is growing. We are 90 minutes from the tarmac at Tarangire gate, and the community is mostly Gorowan, Iraqi and Barbaig.  The community we work with is on the outskirts in the agricultural lands, on the slopes of the beautiful Mount Kwaraa, and looks over the stunningly serene lake Babati. From the primary school we have fantastic views across the rift valley to the escarpment and the pink haze of Lake Manyara. It is one of the most beautiful spots and was home for a while with Baron Bror Blixen who shared my enthusiasm for its beauty.

We were approached by the local community who told us their school was dreadful and asked if we would help. We said we would if they agreed to help themselves. We agreed that if they provided the bricks and worked on the foundation and unskilled work, we would pay for the skilled work, the cement, rood and the other materials needed. Thus our work is bottom up and not top down.

Our Strategy was derived from a community needs assessment and is to: -

• Improve the student education environment by repairing buildings, reducing class sizes, improving the teaching resources (1 book to 7 kids), training the teachers and improve their knowledge and built teachers houses.
• Improve the health of the community by improving diet and teaching personal and domestic hygiene and disease prevention. (We came across a story of a mother whose baby had diarrhoea and so the mother thought the best thing was to stop giving it water and the baby died. The point here is that if you dont know, you dont know and so we need to let people know.
• Develop a sustainable source of income for the school. Being dependant on donations and grants is not sustainable or desirable

We want our tourists to come and visit and see what life is like in a developing country. The press build such a negative image of Africa that we want to show that poverty can be about normal every day people, farmers, who simply don’t grow enough to feed their own families AND pay for schooling and local development and so have to find a balance between the two. Educating our visitors to know that makes them understand that poverty is not something that is just too big to be tackled, it just needs to be done in bite size chunks. Development does not need to be big projects but it does need to have specific, measureable, achievable, realistic targets.

We found that the kids were off sick with diarrhoea and that the town health officer ran a program of de-worming at the school. We looked at this and the causes and concluded that having no washing facilities at the toilets was a major contributing factor and we added basins, and taught the kids to wash their hands. So excited were the kids about turning the water on and off that we broke a lot of taps in the first week. We are the only school with hand washing facilities in Babati.

The existing design for teachers’ houses was hugely brick and cement intensive and so we redesigned it and if the model houses are a success can be rolled out across the country.

Tourism and Philanthropy find the initial investments and the income generation schemes will fund the ongoing maintenance to ensure sustainability.  The first school we are associated with have land which the teachers were supposed to farm, but it failed because teachers are teachers and not farmers, so, with the community agreement, we took over the running of it.

We employ a farm manager and a small team and we have invested in the land and its ability to deliver. We have cows, goats and chickens; their manure goes back to the land as fertilizer. The milk and the eggs are sold. The honey will be sold when it produces and the fish ponds will too, with the fish being sold by the fishermen and will encourage them not to fish the lake illegally.

Each school we work at will have a small business opportunity and will in time generate profits that will pay for the schools ongoing costs. The management of these projects will be handed over to the community once the skills to manage them have been transferred.

Of course the most important aspect of this is the local capacity building. Each scheme needs a team of people to be involved who need to be taught, be it bookkeeping, communication, marketing, packaging, sales and there must be someone ensuring that good governance is being operated and that the profits are being returned to the school. The school needs to learn how to manage their funds and how to budget to maintenance. With these skills people can start to spot their own marketing opportunities I didn’t have a great deal of experience of cultural tourism before conducting my research and what I found was surprising to me. Mostly the ones I went on seemed to consist of walking to a waterfall or a cave, and having lunch in a village. A visit to the great Maasai consisted of seeing them jumping up and down, showing me inside a dwelling before trying to sell me a spear. This was not the cultural tourism I wanted to see. I wanted to be educated, not entertained, to me cultural tourism is not about looking but about learning.

I want our tourists to come away from Tanzania with positive images of a country, an understanding of the differences between different tribes and how similar we all are. After all we all have the same basic objectives in life. Once the differences and similarities are understood, a respect grows, for oneself and for others, and this pride in culture should strengthen it The income from cultural tourism, the ones that I have seen are never going to make a significant impact on the long term development of the community with $5 here and $10 there BUT if, through education, we can make our visitors friends for life, then we can increase the income earning potential.  The biggest problem with development of cultural tourism was that it did not generate enough income fast enough. The needs are such that action is needed now. So we looked at other options.

Volunteering seemed a good solution. We now bring volunteers to our projects to work alongside community not instead of community, alongside the builders not replacing them And Through this exposure to each other with a common purpose, friendships develop and both parties start to learn about life on the other side, it is not just the volunteers who are learning, both parties must learn for the experience to work Volunteering is not just about building classrooms and teaching English. Volunteering is also about teaching IT skills and business knowledge, exploring processes to see how they can be improved upon, there are so many ways in which to help. How this works: In partnership with QUEST (for groups)(approved by  Tourism concern as being ethical organisation) On individual (tailored) basis through LTT (teaching skills, business skills, computer skills) Volunteering fee (pay for the materials and the supporting labour costs of all that they do)  Once you have seen the problems and been part of the solution, you have a huge warm glow about you. Pride in what you have seen and done, and for many people they want to keep hold of that feeling because it is not often that you get that glow of pride and if they don’t hold onto it they have regret. This is therefore a responsibility of the charity to keep people feeling pride in what they are part of, this means feedback that is specific to them and further opportunities to help.  The role of the philanthropist is traditionally to provide finance, but more we want more than that, we would them to visit, see the problems. Philanthropists are normally people with significant skills and it is those skills that we want them to transfer to our community, to help build local capacity so that they too can prosper. We need hands on help in marketing, accounting, processing and route to market. We have projects big and small, from sponsoring a child through secondary and further education, sponsoring a kindergarten teacher, a health awareness day, an HIV/AIFS training session for the teachers, students and community members, or even sponsor a whole school development.