The partners and staff at Sturminster Newton have decided that it would be a positive experience to try and raise money for charity and each year or so we select a new organisation to focus on.

Dr. Liz Burton travels widely and was very impressed with a new form of community tourism established in Ethiopia designed to help the poorest villagers benefit from tourism.

A group of development professionals came up with the idea of a network of community run tourism enterprises that would allow tourists to trek across the remarkable landscape, getting closer to the real culture of the Ethiopian highlands, and at the same time put precious money into the local communities for whom farming is becoming ever more precarious a livelihood.

TESFA seeks to work in partnership with local communities to enable them to generate sustainable improvements in their livelihood through the development of their own tourism related enterprises, while also contributing to the protection of their physical and cultural environments. TESFA sees its role as a catalyst in initiating a process that will become sustainable on a commercial basis. It considers that solutions to poverty alleviation lie with civil society and the rural poor themselves.

The actual concept is very simple. TESFA provides seedcorn funding to villages to buy materials to build facilities (simple, clean, traditional village huts) for tourists and provides training for villagers. Tourists can then make bookings with TESFA who then make arrangements for the clients to visit the village. The villagers then act as hosts and guides and provide donkey transport for bags when they take the client to the next village. The process is then repeated. At each village the tourists pay the villagers a fixed fee for their accommodation, food and services. The villagers then pay those who have provided the services with the profit being reinvested in the community to provide things like schools or other necessary facilities. It is truly sustainable eco tourism with all the money going to those who provide the services; not ‘middlemen or travel agents’.

Any funds we raise will go towards helping expand this network, breaking the cycle of dependence for the rural poor in Ethiopia and be truly enabling in that villagers can reap the rewards of their own work. You can find out more about TESFA at http://www.community-tourism-ethiopia.com/ and indeed consider booking the adventure of a lifetime living and walking in the remote Ethiopian Highland villages whilst at the same time making a real difference to the lives of very poor people.