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Will Some Donors Never Grow Up?

Private enterprises usually operate on the principle of the smallest amount of energy and funding required to produce the greatest outcome.

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Top five picks for community-based tourism accommodation in sub-equatorial Africa

Nothing beats the experience of staying with locals and supporting their local communities. The WHL Group puts forward here five of its favourite community-based accommodation initiatives in Africa.

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WHL Group Supports Wild Asia’s 2010 Responsible Tourism Awards

The WHL Group is this year’s global media partner for Wild Asia’s 2010 Responsible Tourism Awards. Now in their fifth year, the Awards are part of Wild Asia’s Responsible Tourism Initiative

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Going local in Marrakech, Morocco

My passion for Morocco came to me over 10 years ago during a trip in the south of the country. Since then I have been back many times, but the short visits ended one cold, wet, December afternoon in London

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Responsible Tourism Week May 17th – 21st

For the second year in a row, Planeta.com is proud to announce Responsible Tourism Week, revving up for action from May 17-21, 2010.

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whl.travel photo of the week: The Pentecost Jump, Vanuatu

Much has been written about the island of Pentecost (part of the Vanuatu archipelago) and its yearly ritual of death-defying land jumps performed in the south of the island in celebration of the yam harvest.

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OPINION: The Travel 3.0 Era

As I look at the evolution of travel, we are at the leading edge of what I would call Travel 3.0. Travel 1.0 was about the travel professionals and travel experts telling us about the great things to see and do.

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WHL Consulting and 360 Cities Announce Collaboration on Project:Exposure

April 14, 2010 – WHL Consulting and 360 Cities have formally agreed to collaborate as strategic implementation partners of Project:Exposure, a groundbreaking small-business development program.

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Turning tourism development into a social enterprise

There’s a great chapter in ‘The Undercover Economist‘ by Tim Harford titled ‘Why Poor Countries Are Poor’. He talks about his visit to Douala, Cameroon, ‘the Armpit of Africa’ at the end of 2001, which in 1999 was listed by Transparency International as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.  He also talks about why development projects implemented by aid agencies can often fail, using Elinor Ostrom’s study of irrigation in Nepal as an example.

He explains why relying on business to pull countries like this out of poverty is of little use when corruption penetrates to the government level:

“There’s no point investing in a business because the government will not protect you against thieves. (So, you might as well become a thief.) There’s no point in paying your phone bill because nobody can successfully take you to court (so there’s no point being a phone company). There’s no point getting an education because jobs are handed out on merit (and in any case, you can’t borrow money for school fees because the bank cannot collect on the loan, and the government doesn’t provide good schools). There’s no point setting up an import business because customs officers will be the ones to benefit (and so there is little trade, and so the customs office is under-funded and looks even harder for bribes).”

Where businesses can function though, dealing with them as a business and providing them with a way that they can afford to invest in their own success and tap a new market seems like a far more effective approach for generating social change than simply instigating isolated donor funded projects.  This doesn’t mean giving them handouts, but an opportunity to enter the marketplace and purchase services.  It means that cash-rich countries are tasked with innovating new ways to do business with cash-poor countries.  An interesting article was written in the Guardian last week titled ‘Brain Food: Forget the Harvard MBA – learn from Africa‘.  In it Indian entrepreneur C.K. Prahalad is quoted as saying:

“If we stop thinking of the poor as victims and start recognising them as creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up.”

I think this is an interesting approach, and is in fact one that WHL Consulting has recently taken with its latest tourism development initiative named Project:Exposure. Designed for small and medium sized tourism enterprises, the project takes room nights in exchange for services.

Small tourism business can afford to invest in their success

Overcoming obstacles / Photo by Stephen Chapman

Every participant gets a complete audit of their existing tourism products, professionally written content, photographs, marketing material, a completely spherical 360° immersive tour of the area and a website that has full online booking functionality. Participants are also given the opportunity to view first hand the benefits and effects of these services through seminars conducted by WHL Consulting on the dynamics and significance of the Internet and e-commerce.

The idea is to work with a local sponsor so that Project:Exposure can deliver essential e-commerce tools and training to the small and medium sized tourism enterprises with little knowledge, experience or presence in this area.  The services are all offered to businesses at a significantly subsidized rate by working with a local sponsor or donor agency. Participants are not asked to pay cash for the services, but instead a newly developed Tourism Development Bank has been created to take their payment in room nights, which will be sold through the WHL Group network.

The WHL Group made its first transition from development work into the social enterprise field way back in 2006 when whl.travel was transformed from a World Bank project to a private company by a visionary CEO, Len Cordiner; and more recently it has continued along that path with its ongoing tourism development work conducted by WHL Consulting, led by CEO Zachary Rozga.

Supporting the World Heritage Site of Tequila, Mexico

Project:Exposure has already been rolled out in 4 destinations in South Africa with the support of the South African Business Trust, and is now being made available to small businesses in the World Heritage Site of Tequila, Mexico through the support of the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), a fund administered by the Inter-American Development Bank.

The recent rise of social enterprise is all about stimulating fresh thinking, new ideas and solutions to the world’s problems from anyone dynamic, creative and highly motivated enough to make something happen. There have been some incredible success stories and Project:Exposure looks set to be another one.

Our Contributing Editor Michelle Rodrigues will be in Tequila, Mexico to help with the roll out of this project.  We look forward to receiving some updates from the field as things progress.

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Mining our internet social circles

Network Cables / Flickr photo by pascal.charest

The internet is all about social these days, it has been for sometime, and as more of us become more active on the major social networking sites it’s becoming increasingly apparent that although our number of ‘friends’, ‘followers’ or ‘connections’ can be huge, the opportunities for us each to leverage the intelligence that’s locked away in the minds of our contacts are minimal.

The travel space is one area that everyone can contribute expertise to and there are no shortage of websites that play on this fact in an effort to increase the diffusion of local knowledge, and connect travellers to those who have answers to their questions.  Tripbod and Travellr are often cited as two of our favorites.

Extensive integration with the big networks required

The ability to spread local knowledge through sites like these is still very much hindered by their isolation from the social circles that we create for ourselves online though.  The early status update idea has transformed into micro-blogging that makes interacting online a quite seamless and open experience.  The local travel movement (as championed by the likes of whl.travel, Spotted by Locals, Tripbod and Going Local) is begging for us to see knowledge sharing websites that integrate with the obscene amounts of global intelligence available through our extended social networks, and operate in a similar way.

Not everyone can be a social networking site

Travellr has started to open the door on connecting travel questions and answers with other networks, it is a fantastic site with a great look and feel but still relies on users inputting the standard social network information into a new profile on the Travellr site.  Social networking has been cracked, and although a vast amount of startups have contributed to its innovation, it is a numbers game in which Facebook, Google, Twitter and Linked-in hold the cards and can therefore cherry pick the best ideas.

A huge untapped resource

Other sites that are looking beyond creating niche communities and providing a global service need to accept that users don’t want to build new networks all over the web, and they need to begin looking at how they can integrate with the major social networking players and leverage the information already shared, much of which is not being used in any intelligent way.

Google purchases question and answer site

The recent purchase of Aardvark by Google is an indicator that Google understands what needs to happen in this space, and the potential that exists.  It will probably eventually release another new tool that will blow all of these smaller local travel knowledge enterprises out of the water in the same way that it has with Google Buzz.  The addition of personalised social results to the Google search pages is a step in this direction.  The ability of a company to innovate and execute an idea technologically these days limits their success amongst the giants, even if the idea is a good one.