The Role of Open Africa

Racked by poverty, Africa lacks niches in the global economy through which to significantly improve the livelihood of its people. Yet, this continent is custodian of most of the world’s animal and plant species, this in a milieu in which the global environmental crisis is intensifying by the day. Increasingly, a beseeching call is being heard and felt around the world to reconnect with nature, Africa being the best place in which to do that.

This provides us with a huge opportunity to utilise our indigenous skills and assets not only to create millions of jobs but also to generate the cash needed for the conservation of those assets, through tourism, the fastest growing and biggest employment industry on earth.

A movement and a programme
Against that philosophical background Open Africa was registered as an NGO in 1995 under the patronage of Nelson Mandela. The organisation is the originator of a cross-sector pan-African collaborative movement, the aims of which are to alleviate poverty by increasing community participation in tourism and stimulating the market for travel to rural and marginalised areas in symbiosis with conservation. It does this by creating tourism routes – in effect clusters of operators and attractions.

Through the support of corporations, governments, aid organisations and other NGOs, Open Africa rallies all the players in an area around a common vision based on their features and characteristics. It collects, collates and presents their details and those of the attractions of the area on a GIS integrated website – creating comprehensive and authentic area-specific information for travellers. Besides creating jobs and inspiring heritage and nature conservation among locals, further outcomes of this are that it gives hope where despair is often prevalent and enables on site capacity-building based on disseminating the hands-on experience of and among participants.

Routes
A route is a destination-level partnership clustering tourism attractions (accommodation suppliers, international and domestic tour operators, transport operators, local artisans, guides, food suppliers, other tourism entrepreneurs and local government). It provides a platform from which all levels of the community can collaborate in promoting tourism to their area.  A route can be any length, covering varied attractions and can be traversed by any means. A route serves as a branding for the tourist products of an area, the benefit of which is crucial to competitive marketing.

At this time 54 community-based Open Africa routes have been developed in six countries. Already there are 1906 participants on these routes, employing just short of 20 000 people in more than 200 towns and villages.

The Problem and a Solution – Why This Initiative Matters

Economically – Most rural and marginalised communities are caught in a poverty trap. They have few regional let alone domestic or other products to export. Usually the limited business in these areas is agriculturally-based, most of which is either in the hands of established operators or of a subsistence nature, with nothing in between. This is where tourism potential is especially favourable, for it entails the importation of customers, who come at their own expense, pay cash for what they experience, and then leave the product behind for resale again and again. In other words it involves the distribution of customers to markets rather than the (usual) other way around. Thus it also relies more on culture, heritage, nature assets and indigenous skills than productivity in the industrial sense of the word.

Environmentally – Most rural communities are situated within, alongside or near to Protected Areas. These areas are crucial to biosphere conservation but face the same threat from the ravages of poverty as do the local inhabitants, for it makes no sense to expect people who are struggling to survive to care about animals and plants. This raises the threat of poaching and other forms of degradation. But these Protected Areas have good potential for attracting visitors, which links them to tourism in a way where they can become wealth creators in a symbiotic relationship in which poverty reduction is promoted through conservation and vice versa.

Learning as we go
Whereas the idea that resulted in Open Africa was mooted in 1990, a think tank assembled in 1993, the organisation registered in 1995 and the first route launched in 1999, after implementing the programme through the development of several routes and getting the basics right in terms of procedure, the first priority was to achieve a critical mass and credibility.

Over the seven years after the first one was launched, 40 routes were developed. However, reaching this stage coincided with the emergence of lessons regarding development at the grass-root level that demanded unexpected attention. For example, a tendency for enthusiasm to flag when participants have transport difficulties in getting to meetings; the blocking of down the line communications by a lack of diligence or burn out on the part of Route Forum chairpersons; the absence of business acumen even of the most basic kind, and more in respect of realities regarding the effects of poverty in preventing progress. Strategies had to be worked out and implemented to overcome these hurdles and hardly a day goes by without some new lesson being learned.

A Societal Ecosystem
Acting as the catalyst, Open Africa combines donors with affiliates, tourism and conservation agencies, governments, other NGOs and route participants themselves as collaborative agents in constructing a societal ecosystem in which they benefit from each others strengths. With improved capacity enabled through the intervention of the national government (Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism) in partnership with the Business Trust, coupled with continued support from the corporate sector, the hands-on knowledge and experience gained so far is being re-invested back into existing routes. Having a critical mass is making it easier to find and apply solutions to hurdles as they arise. Now marketing of the network is intensifying and Open Africa is widening the ecosystem of collaborators engaged in the initiative, while expanding the network of routes continues. The view taken from the start was that this is not a short-term project but one that will outlive its originators and continue growing exponentially over time.

Noel de Villiers is the Chief Executive Officer of Open Africa.