A single network bridging donors and vetted locally led community and conservation organisations across the region is a simple idea with a big impact, writes Lorraine Kearney
Conservation South Luangwa in action – a proud Community and Conservation Partner
Melissa Foley is that strange beast: a corporate hippy. She can rock a power suit and heft a briefcase with the best of them, but rather than profit she’s driven by a strong moral compass and a deep concern for the wellbeing of the planet and everything in it.
She identifies as a “recovering American”. For the past decade, Cape Town has been her home, after spending four years in Tanzania and nine years before that travelling the globe.
“In my past life, I was in commercial real estate in the US,” she tells me. It’s not such a stretch to where she is now, in the sustainability in tourism industry. Bear with us: both need a strong will, excellent networking skills and team players. “It’s just finding the gaps and then connecting who needs what. So although it’s a completely different industry and demographic, it’s all parallel because it’s all humans.”
Melissa is spearheading the new baby at Africa’s Eden: the Conservation and Community Impact programme, and is setting up the Africa’s Eden Impact Forum, an innovative idea that will smooth the path towards sustainability.
Her game plan? Advocating for more transparent, more measurable and more meaningful impact in tourism businesses’ operations and supply chain so that they don’t greenwash. It’s about more than simply employing people from the local community or supporting a local school by delivering Christmas hampers.
“It’s about doing stuff deeper and verifying it.”
The nub of the programme is a free platform connecting locally led community and conservation organisations with tourism businesses across the eight southern African countries where Africa’s Eden works (Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar). The goal is to make it easier to build transparent, impactful partnerships that work for everyone involved.
“Community organisations get visibility and access to collaboration opportunities, while tourism businesses get a credible framework for documenting contributions and meeting environmental, social, and governance expectations.”
The hippy in Melissa shines: “We all have an ethical obligation, but there is also an economic opportunity, to support the people in places that we’re operating in and profiting from.”
The Africa’s Eden Community and Conservation Partner Programme is a vetted network of credible, high-impact organisations, grassroots NGOs and projects. It was set up to support public awareness and philanthropic partnerships with tourism trade partners and travellers.
Already, tourism companies build levies and donations into itineraries that go to their foundations. But this is where real empowerment and transformation can happen, she says.
Her vision is one independent, open source platform - the Community and Conservation network - a tool that links the donor (whether that be a traveller, a tourism business, or anyone for that matter) directly to these vetted grassroots NGOs.
“The principle and core of this programme is that this open source network is a resource for travellers and for trade (or anybody) to have the confidence and trusted peace of mind that any organisation within this open source network has had their homework checked,” she explains. “They’re properly registered. They give receipts. They’ve got references. They’re locally led. They have high impacts.”
This is how it works: the tourism businesses will build into their itineraries donations to people in places that their travellers are visiting to leave it a better place. The tourism companies then make these donations to the chosen organisation, and there’s a paper trail because the organisations are going to be trained on how to properly keep track of those donations.
“For example, a family of four from the UK visits Zimbabwe and the tourism company will make the donation on their behalf. The travellers will be able to click on a link to take them to the network, where they can choose an organisation that inspires them, and that is the organisation to which the company will make the donation on the travellers’ behalf.”
It gives the consumer choice – they decide where the money goes in this network of vetted organisations. It also gives peace of mind that the tourism companies are accountable. There is transparent auditing to verify that they’re sending the money to these organisations.
The network also creates an opportunity for the tourism businesses to engage with philanthropic partnerships where they can start building into their operations support and relationships other than just money with these local organisations – and there’s a way to track and measure that.
Key to this network, or open source platform, is a vetting process. “If you’re an NGO listed in this network, you must be properly registered as an NGO; give receipts for donations; have credible experience working with other organisations; work in concerns like climate action, job skills, capacity building, gender equality, or education – things that obviously have a relation to tourism.”
Within that network, there’s open source sharing of knowledge and resources of learnings and best practices, she explains. “There is a centralised place where we can rally support for these businesses to help them grow, get quality control for their product, financial management and literacy, like marketing stories, like helping them with a website or social media so that they can tell their story and get more public awareness about the work that they do.”
It’ll tick at least one sustainability certification criterion: continual, deep, measurable impact work with a project.
She talks of a carrot and stick approach. And the biggest stick is in sight. “We’re at this tipping point,” Melissa explains. “The EU’s Empowering Consumers for a Green Transition Directive will be in effect from September enforcing the downstream supply chain auditing of all products that do business with it. There is a very, very real risk of losing market access where these partners in Europe and these DMCs will no longer use you if they can’t audit you and they can’t verify your sustainability credentials.”
The regulations aim to end greenwashing. They require companies operating in the EU to provide detailed, standardised disclosures on their environmental, social and governance impacts. Companies must report how sustainability issues affect them financially and on their own impact on people and the planet. Agents have to report to their home governments in the EU the social and environmental impact actions of their entire downstream supply chain. And you’ll be dropped like a hot potato if you don’t measure up.
“What I’ve been trying to do is to bring together all of the stakeholders at every level of the tourism supply chain to say: ‘Right guys, there’s an iceberg ahead. Let’s build a big boat that is inclusive, that is scalable, everybody is invited, there’s no egos. Let’s look at the bigger picture because we’re all swimming in the same tsunami together.’
“Everyone is asking the same questions because it’s all being driven by the EU. So let’s engage the internationally recognised schemes like The Long Run, Fair Trade Tourism or Travelife. Let’s have one open source, free resource centre. Businesses, here is your auditing tool to see where you’re doing great and where the gaps are. So now you know what your sustainability journey will look like for certification.”
The carrot? That’s your marketing story, and a potentially profitable one at that. “The whole point of this is to give more oversight, more accountability, more transparency, by building this open source framework to make it easier for the businesses to engage and to allow businesses the right to have that distinction that someone’s checked their homework, that they’re really doing what they say they are. And to be able to authentically weave it into their marketing story, their corporate social responsibility and to differentiate them from their competitors and other businesses that are just talking but not doing.”
Change is scary, agreed. But this kind of change makes sense.
