Tourism is fun and most people prefer to have it in their time of relaxation which is mainly on vacation. Others have study tours that one would term as educational tourism. This is mainly with experiencing the change in climate, weather in other countries and how the different animals live in these inhabitants. Now much as we all enjoy people traveling and discovering we should also remember that there are people in the places that we are traveling to.
Most of the tourist attractions we have are in villages whereby many of the families that live there are really struggling to survive and the problem is much as these areas were recognized as tourist attractions, people forget the communities that live in these areas and very few times do the locals benefit from tourism.
Some few areas like Bushara Island Camp have had ideas like putting up lodges and tents that tourist can use when they come to visit and the money that is got is used for the benefit of the community. We still remember that there are not so many of these community projects in our country.
As Speke Uganda Holidays, most of our clients who go to Kibale Forest have the opportunity to visit a primary school in Bigodi called the Bigodi Primary School. We take them there and the clients get a feel of the typical Ugandan life of these pupils. On many occasions, some of the visitors have brought scholastic materials or have given money to the school just so that the children can have the basic scholastic materials that they need to study. The children get to interact with the visitors and soon the visitors have stories to tell about their visit to the school.
We have also had a couple of clients use Bushara Island Camp because we know that it is a community project and the people in these communities benefit from. We encourage tourists to stay there when they go to Lake Bunyonyi.
We believe that it is important for them to come to our country and see issues as they are especially concerning the communities and not just hear about them. Then it is up to them to decide whether they want to do anything about it or not.
One of our objectives is "To have a positive impact on communities through supporting local initiatives" and we have already started looking for the different ways we can do this in 2012.