The African Travel Recovery Fund is a follow up to African Travel Crisis Fund, which was launched in response to the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on community-led travel businesses. The aim is to raise $250,000 to support the recovery of five of these businesses, all of which work at the coalface of conservation and community development in Africa.
Background
At the start of the pandemic, we quickly moved to set up the African Travel Crisis Fund as a way to try to support some of our partners who were facing significant loss in revenue due to travel restrictions caused by Covid-19, and which threatened their ability to continue the conservation and community development work they are so critical in delivering. This fund distributed $106,611, resulting in: protecting 228 jobs, 915 community members supported through community development work, and supported partners responsible for managing over 896,000 hectares of conservation land.
From crisis to recovery
As the pandemic continued, so we replaced the Crisis Fund with the African Travel Recovery Fun, marking a shift away from fire-fighting towards a more strategic long-term plan for helping rebuild the conservation travel businesses in an even more impactful, greener, and sustainable way.
Mobilising all resources
The Recovery Fund will do more than just distribute money, which was the sole remit of the Crisis Fund. Instead, we will mobilise all our resources – intellectual capital, network and contacts – to develop a structured support programme for the five targetted businesses. We will be working beyond just Wild Philanthropy, bringing the whole Africa House Group to play. We have identified five opportunities that we would like to start working with immediately – across Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia.
For more information on the Recovery Fund and the five identified business, please contact Paul Herbertson. For travel that benefits these five businesses, please contact Will Jones and Angela Sacha, both of Journeys by Design.