Tourism and Development: a happy marriage?

"Ethical tourism” seems to be an “in” buzz-phrase right now. At least if the Guardian podcast of April 28th is anything to go by, but what does it mean? Like that other piece of jargon, “ecotourism”, any meaning it might have had has become obscured, layer upon layer, by those with questionable ethics and “green” credentials badging themselves this way without deserving or scrutiny. Greenwashing is an industry. Has ethicowashing become one too? How can we distinguish true ethical tourism from mere claims? What is at the heart of the idea?

 

Out of the podcast I picked up a few hints about what ethical tourism is supposed to be:

• Tourism should not be done in such a way as to weaken the local culture.
• Tourism should be well regulated by governments.
• Tourism is vital to the diversification of the income generating activities of poor communities.
• Tourism operators should pay fair wages and provide good conditions of employment.
• The tourism value chain should strive to ensure a “fair” proportion of the chain value is delivered to the host community.
• Local ownership of tourism assets works best.
• Tourism operators should not deprive their host communities of their full share of local resources e.g. water. 

Now I’m going to embarrass myself. You see, we run a thing called the Ol Lentille Project. For sure we don’t always get it right, but we try our darnedest to be green and ethical, and I’d like to tell you how. Blowing your own trumpet can be very ugly, and (for a Brit at least) is always embarrassing.

 

The Ol Lentille Project is a 3-legged stool in poverty-stricken Maasai and Samburu communities in Laikipia, Kenya on the semi-arid edge of the fabled Northern Frontier District deserts. The legs are economic development, conservation, and community development. Get one of these wrong, and your stool falls over. At the risk of mixing my metaphors, the stool is also a (potentially) virtuous circle, each leg depending on and supporting the others.

 

In our case most of the economic development comes from tourism (a ‘lodge’ – 4 private fully-staffed houses – called The Sanctuary at Ol Lentille. Without good conservation of habitat and wildlife in the 20,000 acre Ol Lentille Conservancy, there would be no tourists, and without good community development benefits, the community would not support conservation. Or maybe they would not support tourism either – like the community of Nazareth, Colombia, who have banned tourists for damaging their culture. Trying to get all 3 legs of the stool strong and the same length is an interesting challenge. But how dull would life be without problems to solve?

 

Tourists take in the conserved land at the Sanctuary at Ol Lentille

 

To return to the hints I picked up from the podcast:

 

Tourism should not weaken the local culture. Here, pastoralism is the way of life. It is the culture. In its heyday, East African pastoralists were freely ranging herdsmen, following the rains and the grass with their livestock over vast distances: an adaptive existence. The top business schools now teach adaptive management, the Maasai got there first. Our world might move fast, but in developing countries, pastoralists are dealing with seismic change: climate change. In one year pastoralists may lose 80% of their livestock (almost all of their assets and income) to starvation, and inter-drought time is decreasing. With no asset security through livestock, pastoralists are increasingly seeking other livelihoods strategies. Mostly, they want education for their children. Those children are not likely to want to follow the cattle like their fathers. Schools are not nomadic. Pastoralists want their children to live near the schools, so sendentarisation is now the norm. Settlements like Kimanjo grow, putting pressure on natural resources, especially water. Health facilities, markets and shops follow. The result: degradation of habitat for both livestock and wildlife. Result: no wildlife for tourists, and less likelihood of a traditional and well-preserved culture being available for the rest of us to learn from.

 

Traditional Maasai culture

 

What can we do about it; and what are we doing at the Ol Lentille Project?

 

We are building schools, striving for these schools to deliver high quality education, supplementing scarce government teachers with additional ones, providing training and resources. All our school builds include capacity for rainwater catchment and storage; and all the schools we support have conservation in the curriculum.

 

Nursery children at an Ol Lentille Trust- supported school

 We are introducing a strategy (a philosophy?) for conservation grazing, to improve and maintain a habitat fit for wildlife and livestock. And we have helped the community to set up a “living museum of Maasai life”: an opportunity for tourists to learn (and provide some income to the community), for people to continue in the pride of their traditions, and for the young to re-connect with their roots. Against the forces of economic and social change, a burgeoning population, and climate change, these are drops in the ocean, but we feel we are making a big difference in a small place.

 

Tourism should be well regulated by government. Kenya is the third most corrupt country in Africa (equal to Zimbabwe- would you put people's livelihoods in the hands of that government?). The chances of good regulation, undistorted by the purposes of the kleptocracy, are remote. Kenya works, and is largely a stable democracy, because of its bright, well-educated and energetic people. It works because it has a vigorous free press. And it works because of very high levels of freedom to do the right thing. The price of that is, of course, a very high level of freedom to do the wrong thing. We welcome international scrutiny and audit of what we do. We strive for it to be the right thing – always with the community not for the community. John Githongo's 'Ni Sisi' work emphasises that the way to get Kenya's corruption levels down is to start at the grassroots. Educating, developing and lifting a community out of poverty will allow them to participate more in political circles, 'empowering' them with the knowledge, ability and confidence to hold their government to account at all levels.

 

Read Michaela Wrong’s book ‘It’s Our Turn To Eat’, the story of Githongo (pictured)’s fight against corruption in Kenya if you want to learn more.

 

Tourism is vital to the diversification of the income generating activities of poor communities. We agree. However, tourism is a fickle business, riding the waves of fashion, the state of the global economy, and fears of real or imagined insecurity. Sure, encourage community based tourism to thrive, but let it not dominate the local economic landscape – or the landscape, come to that. The Ol Lentille Project strives to provide sufficient community development to allow people to diversify in other ways, beoming less reliant on livestock which is dangerous in these environmentally unpredictable times. Bioenterprise, microfinance programmes, further education and employment in schools provide further opportunities.

 

A University graduate from Lentille community,
pursuing alternative livelihood strategy and reducing dependence on risky ones

 

Interesting to notice that in the context of ethical tourism, the moral compass does not always point true north. Almost a million tourists a year come to Kenya, as already noted the 3rd most corrupt country in Africa. Some 300,000 even visit Myanmar each year, human rights abuse as a way of life notwithstanding. However, if Kenya lost its tourism revenue, the percentage of revenue that is used for development would be slashed, harming people's livelihoods, perpetuating poverty and hindering people's ability to hold. It is an issue which puts moral compasses into a spin, and even Aung San Suu Kyi has asked tourists to return to Burma to support the country's social development and learn first hand of the political issues it faces. Discerning consumers need to be discerning tourists too. Do ask difficult questions. Do find out who REALLY benefits from your tourism dollar.

 

Tourism operators should pay fair wages and provide good conditions of employment. Absolutely. When we set up here we conducted the area’s first salary survey, and pitched our salaries and conditions 20% better than the top decile. This is way above the Kenya legal minimum (which has just been raised to $34 per month for unskilled workers). All our employees are on permanent contracts. We do not hire and fire at will. We did have to have layoff in the wake of the 2008 post-election violence in Kenya when no tourists came, but we have since compensated staff. We do have a business to run and cost management is important. It is not as important as delighting guests and generating revenue, but it is important, or we would not be able to keep the Project going. If the state of the nation’s roads was better, our transport and supply costs (40% of our total cost base) would fall and even more could go into salaries.

 

Staff from the Sanctuary at Ol Lentille relaxing at a community party

 

The tourism value chain should strive to ensure a “fair” proportion of the chain value is delivered to the host community. Who is going to judge what is fair? In 2010 we paid fees to our host community of $38,000. The business did not turn a profit that year. Overseas travel agents and tour operators charged us 25% of our revenue to supply 70% of our guests. The truth is that without those tour operators we would not have a business - no business no donors. Income to the community from sources other than fees (including donations by our guests) in 2010 was some $350,000. The "value chain" in the tourism industry is not simple, and does not lend itself to simplistic nostrums.

 

Local ownership of tourism assets works best. We agree. We donated $1.6 million, the African Wildlife Foundation $100,000, and we got the European Union/Tourism Trust Fund of Kenya to put up a further $300,000 to build The Sanctuary at Ol Lentille – an immoveable asset. The community owns it. We manage it under long term contract. You may be thinking whoever did that must be out of their tree-maybe! I think it was Voltaire who coined the phrase “enlightened self-interest”. Too often, in East Africa at least, there is conflict between the landowner and the tourism investor. There is just no mutuality of interest. Ever wondered why so many “lodges” are tented camps? So they can be whisked away to another location in the case of unresolvable conflict. Since our community owns the main business asset their interest in its success is exactly identified with ours. Result: no (or very little) conflict.

 

Tourism operators should not deprive their host communities of their full share of local resources e.g. water. Once again, absolutely. 80% of water here is rainwater catchment. The other 20% comes from a distant borehole drilled and maintained at the expense of the business. Earlier this year all of our water sources dried up – ah climate change. Again. We did have to buy water from a neighbouring community who have a very productive government-funded borehole, but we offered them 30% more money for the water than they were charging their own community members. That cash provided much needed additional funds for secondary school bursaries – secondary schooling is not free in Kenya. Other local natural resources we use, we pay for: sand and stone for building; the average annual return to the community on grass is 650% per annum (see that explained in John's Conservancy blog series).

 

And what of “ecotourism”? This, surely, goes hand in hand with ethical tourism, since exploiting a community's natural resources exploits both them and their environment. As I’ve already noted, only 20% of our water comes from an aquifer. All our hot water and electricity is provided by solar. All our rooves catch rainwater. All our grey water is recycled. All our waste is recycled or composted. When we have completed the land rehabilitation work on the recently added 15,000 acres of the Conservancy and measured the success of that work scientifically we are confident that even if guests do not offset their airline carbon, our carbon footprint will be neutral. In 2012 we will begin a programme of supplier selection taking account of their “greenness” too.

Houses at the Sanctuary at Ol Lentille with rooves designed for water catchment

 

When John was a young man, working at an asbestos mine in Swaziland, he was sent by the British head office of the company to make sure that none of the mine’s salary policies were racially discriminatory. They were. So he proposed the solution of converting African workers rations’ into additions to their salaries. The following month there was a long line of miners wanting salary advances! Their salary increase was all spent. But just a moment, this was not their fault – what had the company done to provide any training or advice about household budgeting for a much larger and now independent income? Nothing.

 

The price of rapid and large economic development at the community level is not much different it seems to me. It has to be accompanied by training and advisory services in ranch governance and financial management – what the international aid community calls capacity building I guess. We’re happy to say that AWF are now doing that, which will help to further ensure that tourism is a positive development experience here.