Responsible Profit is Possible

Responsible Profit is Possible

Camps International will shortly be celebrating 10 years of operating responsible school and gap year expeditions across the globe. What started in 2002 as as a small operation on the coast of Kenya has grown to include camps in Borneo, Cambodia, Tanzania, Uganda and more recently Ecuador. Traditionally the summer season was the reserve of UK based schools, however as the message about our unique brand of responsible tourism has spread so has the location of traveling schools. In the last few years we have welcomed students from Australia, China, Vietnam and even Kenya. Dipesh Pabari our Africa Operations Manager was asked by the Association of International Schools in Africa (AISA) to write a piece on Responsible school tourism for Connections magazine. He has since delivered this article as a talk at the Annual conference in Nairobi. See the article below.

“As we wound down our summer season with a big smile of satisfaction and some relief, I could not help but think how middle class high school Kenyan students would fit into a program like ours. Most of our hip youth loathe the thought of spending a long weekend in ‘shags’ let alone spending a month planting trees and digging toilets. Then I wondered whether this lot who spend their holidays hanging out in Nairobi’s shopping malls would feel about spending a month in the south of France picking grapes in a vineyard or working on a sheep farm in the UK? Would this appeal to them?

Over the course of two months we hosted about 650 students from the UK in Kenya and Tanzania who spent a month in country working hard and playing hard. I recalled scenes of 30-40 pairs of hands digging away under the baking sun as they eagerly tried to complete their target on a trench in yet another neglected primary school on the periphery of Mwaluganje Elephant Sanctuary. I remembered another group who sang through the entire six days of laying blocks for a classroom in a little primary school tucked away on the South Coast and I smiled thinking about the team who refused to stop working until they finished breaking the old concrete of a massive water tank for cattle that was to be restored for elephants on Rukinga Ranch.

This was my third full-blown season with Camps International – a responsible Travel company that operates its own camps and projects across the Coast Province in Kenya and around the Arusha-Moshi region in northern Tanzania. With the primary clientele being under 18 high school students from the UK, one is immediately inclined to wonder how you would convince a teenager who has just completed high school to spend their first month of freedom taking bucket baths and digging holes in the African outback.

And equally important, is the enigma that 95% of these students actually fundraise and work odd jobs for over a year to save up and come out for these trips. This is not mommy and daddy paying to get rid of little Johnny for the summer. This is someone who believes that this is the right thing to do: a young mind who chooses to spend a month working on various projects that they may or may not see to completion on a continent that they have never set foot on and in the case of Kenya, probably the only thing they have heard is that people were hacking one another to pieces over some rigged election less than two years ago.

Expeditions such as the ones Camps International offer are part of a growing trend across the globe. For those that work in the industry, you will be very familiar with the ‘Gap Year’ industry which is all about offering young people a useful holiday which gives them exposure to new cultures and societies and hands on experience with various ‘problems’ from wildlife conservation to community development in parts of the world like ours – the so-called Third World. In the UK, taking a ‘gap year’ has become so much the norm that one would be considered weird if they went straight to University out of High School.

Like any other trend, the gap industry has not been spared from the critical gaze of the media, which keeps a tab on just how these expeditions are packaged. It’s a necessary evil that keep its eye on the profit moguls for like anything else that operates in regions like ours, it is so easy to turn pictures of swollen bellies and fly infested children or elephants grazing peacefully on the savanna landscape into profit.  As a Kenyan, I loathe what Africa has become in the western eyes (more so because we allowed it to happen) and thus approached entry into the responsible travel industry very cautiously.

Having worked in the not-for-profit sector for the past 15 years, words like ‘sustainable’, ‘eco’, ‘responsible’ ‘community’ had long since become a cryptic crossword divorced from the reality that they are used to describe. Most people who are not in the NGO are very skeptical about this do-good industry but that is another discussion. Suffice to say, that from where I am sitting now in a company that employs over 60 people and spends millions of shillings building schools, creatingincome generating activities for various local youth groups and women’s groups, repairs water tanks for elephants, builds new homes for widows and the elderly, plants thousands of trees and still manages to make some profit – I would like to think that those countless workshops and conferences that led to trends like ‘responsible travel’ and ‘sustainable tourism’ have actually played their part in creating what I hope one day will be the norm and not the exception.”