Amahoro Tourism Initiative, Rwanda
The Amahoro Tourism Initiative has the explicit desire to contribute to a long-term peaceful environment in Rwanda. It tries to involve local people as equal partners in the development of tourist activities wherever possible. Currently, the Initiative consists of the tour operator Amahoro Tours and the Amahoro Community-based Tourism Association (ACOTA).
The ACOTA unites various local partners of Amahoro Tours. These consist of individuals, families, groups, and associations that provide tourism goods or services of interest to the tour operator’s clients. The Association assists, among others, with product development, quality improvement, and capacity building. Since 2005, the communities also receive support in the form of capacity building from the Dutch development agency SNV.
SDT supports the aforementioned activities in several ways. Michael Grosspietsch, co-founder and overall coordinator of the initiative, lives in Rwanda. Among others, he supervises the work of regular volunteers and advisors on the ground. Currently, Christiane Gorka is providing on-site advice to the ACOTA for half a year. In the summer of 2006, she is joined by Jonas Feldmann, Annika Steffen and 4 other volunteers who will focus particularly on product diversification and development, as well as background research. At our headquarters in Germany, we provide advisory services over the Internet, ranging from issues such as customer relations and tour development to internal management and marketing. Our marketing section is particularly active for the Initiative. In cooperation with volunteers in Germany (frequently final year students who use this opportunity to link their thesis to our work), they detect potential marketing channels in Europe, contact international tour operators that might desire to find an incoming operator in Rwanda, and represent the Initiative at tourism fairs and other events such as the World Travel Market in London, the ITB in Berlin or JATA in Tokyo. Contact: michael@sd-tourism.org |
In 2003, Greg Bakunzi and Michael Grosspietsch founded the Amahoro Tourism Initiative in Rwanda. Amahoro means ‘peace’ in the local language Kinyarwanda. It is particularly appropriate in the case of this tragic country, where about a million people were brutally killed by the hands of their fellow countrymen in an orchestrated genocide just a bit more than a decade ago. Not only does tourism bring much-needed foreign exchange earnings as well as jobs to the country. But in this context, tourism has much wider implications. Tourists in Rwanda always perform a sort of an ambassadorial role. At the time of the genocide, many Rwandans felt as if the world had abandoned them, as if the global community simply did not care about this little country and its people. Tourism has the potential to rebuild some of this feeling that “someone cares”.
Amahoro Tours has gained a strong national reputation for its responsible tourism, ecotourism and community-based tourism products, as well as its policy to enhance its linkages with local providers of tourism goods and services, and other sectors of the local economy. It offers specialized intimate tours that focus on a variety of natural attractions as well as the living culture. Most importantly, clients have constant contact with local people and, thereby, develop a very personal relationship with the destination. 
Another more inofficial pillar of the initiative consists of its activities in wider development fields. The team on the ground is trying to answer the growing need of international partners to do more in the field of development then the occasional donation or tourist visits. The initiative has created a network through which to disseminate aid in the form of funds, goods and services. A first bigger project, for example, took place in late 2005 when members of a Philippino partner organization (Lifeline) visited the area. The team consisted of doctors, computer experts, nurses, construction experts etc, and supplied goods such as computers, medical supply, clothes and condoms.