The Great Trekkers Safaris, Uganda

Project name: The Great Trekkers Safaris

Project location: The project is located in Mbarara western Uganda and works with a rural community of 150 people living in one of the conservation area of Lake Mburo National Park

Website: http://www.greattrekkers.ug/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheGreattrekkersSafaris/

Project description:

The Great Trekkers Safaris was started in March 2016 by 2 dedicated young graduates Rogers & Herbert both driven with a genuine passion for tourism and community development. As young graduates we realized a genuine need of starting up a social enterprise which would not only benefit the company owners but would also benefit and develop the communities. We happen to come from Western Uganda widely regarded as a tourism hub with the best cultural, nature and wildlife attractions but we realized that the available tour companies’ only front profit making at the expense of the people in our communities. So we came up with the idea of starting up a community based tour company that fronts Community Based Tourism for sustainable growth and development. We started up by organizing several community camp experiences for young people where we got the opportunity to discuss community related issues in line of tourism, conservation and youth empowerment as young corporate while promoting such unknown sites. Currently our company has opened wild life clubs in the two primary schools located in Lake Mburo National park and we are working hand in hand with the rural communities of Rwenjeru community where we intend to establish an Eco-friendly community camp site.
Our Project has so far trained the local youth both females and males to become local tour guides and we intend to have a special program specifically for females who can be trained as birding guides as it's a sector they could work on well and with much ease.

Goal and purpose of the project:

Goal: To enable every individual have a direct benefit from tourism by promoting sustainable tourism initiatives
Purpose: To empower communities within conservation areas by fronting community based tourism for sustainable development.

Motivation of the applicant / applicant team:

We are driven by the genuine passion we all have for community empowerment and transformation. As a group of young graduates we realized a need of setting up a locally owned project that would not only benefit owners but it would empower and transform the lives of all people in our community through using tourism as a uniting umbrella. We strongly believe that tourism is everyone's business and in tourism everyone is a winner. Thus we believe that with an extra hand of support we could cement a positive influence in our community through promoting sustainable tourism development for all.

Use of prize money:

We would use this prize money in training more youth to become professional and well equipped local tour guides because we believe that with continuous marketing, setting up various external links, agents and partnerships, our company will attract more travelers, community volunteers and tourists who will be traveling with our tour company and thus for us to create sustainable income projects to these youths, we intend to always hire the trained local guides for all the trips we shall be offering to all our guests. Also some money will be used in training women groups in art and craft work which will always be sold at the community camp site we intend to establish soon. The rest of the prize money will be used in facilitating the 2 wild life clubs which we launched in may 2016 at Nyabuhama and Rwenjeru primary schools