Camps International will shortly be celebrating 10 years of operating responsible school and gap year expeditions across the globe. What started in 2002 as as a small operation on the coast of Kenya has grown to include camps in Borneo, Cambodia, Tanzania, Uganda and more recently Ecuador. Traditionally the summer season was the reserve of UK based schools, however as the message about our unique brand of responsible tourism has spread so has the location of travelling schools. In the last few years we have welcomed students from Australia, China, Vietnam and even Kenya. Dipesh Pabari our Africa Operations Manager was asked by the Association of International Schools in Africa (AISA) to write a piece on Responsible school tourism for Connections magazine. He has since delivered this article as a talk at the Annual conference in Nairobi. See the article below.

“As we wound down our summer season with a big smile of satisfaction and some relief, I could not help but think how middle class high school Kenyan students would fit into a program like ours. Most of our hip youth loathe the thought of spending a long weekend in ‘shags’ let alone spending a month planting trees and digging toilets. Then I wondered whether this lot who spend their holidays hanging out in Nairobi’s shopping malls would feel about spending a month in the south of France picking grapes in a vineyard or working on a sheep farm in the UK? Would this appeal to them?

Over the course of two months we hosted about 650 students from the UK in Kenya and Tanzania who spent a month in country working hard and playing hard. I recalled scenes of 30-40 pairs of hands digging away under the baking sun as they eagerly tried to complete their target on a trench in yet another neglected primary school on the periphery of Mwaluganje Elephant Sanctuary. I remembered another group who sang through the entire six days of laying blocks for a classroom in a little primary school tucked away on the South Coast and I smiled thinking about the team who refused to stop working until they finished breaking the old concrete of a massive water tank for cattle that was to be restored for elephants on Rukinga Wildlife Sanctuary.

This was my third full-blown season with Camps International – a responsible Travel company that operates its own camps and projects across the Coast Province in Kenya and around the Arusha-Moshi region in northern Tanzania and on the east in Tanga. With the primary clientele being under 18 high school students from the UK, one is immediately inclined to wonder how you would convince a teenager who has just completed high school to spend their first month of freedom taking bucket baths and digging holes in the African outback.

And equally important, is the enigma that 95% of these students actually fundraise and work odd jobs for over a year to save up and come out for these trips. This is not mommy and daddy paying to get rid of little Johnny for the summer. This is someone who believes that this is the right thing to do: a young mind who chooses to spend a month working on various projects that they may or may not see to completion on a continent that they have never set foot on and in the case of Kenya, probably the only thing they have heard is that people were hacking one another to pieces over some rigged election less than two years ago.

Expeditions such as the ones Camps International offer are part of a growing trend across the globe. For those that work in the industry, you will be very familiar with the ‘Gap Year’ industry which is all about offering young people a useful holiday which gives them exposure to new cultures and societies and hands on experience with various ‘problems’ from wildlife conservation to community development in parts of the world like ours – the so-called Third World. In the UK, taking a ‘gap year’ has become so much the norm that one would be considered weird if they went straight to University out of High School.

Like any other trend, the gap industry has not been spared from the critical gaze of the media, which keeps a tab on just how these expeditions are packaged. It’s a necessary evil that keep its eye on the profit moguls for like anything else that operates in regions like ours, it is so easy to turn pictures of swollen bellies and fly infested children or elephants grazing peacefully on the savanna landscape into profit.  As a Kenyan, I loathe what Africa has become in the western eyes (more so because we allowed it to happen) and thus approached entry into the responsible travel industry very cautiously.

Having worked in the not-for-profit sector for the past 15 years, words like ‘sustainable’, ‘eco’, ‘responsible’ ‘community’ had long since become a cryptic crossword divorced from the reality that they are used to describe. Most people who are not in the NGO are very skeptical about this do-good industry but that is another discussion. Suffice to say, that from where I am sitting now in a company that employs over 60 people and spends millions of shillings building schools, creating income generating activities for various local youth groups and women’s groups, repairs water tanks for elephants, builds new homes for widows and the elderly, plants thousands of trees and still manages to make some profit – I would like to think that those countless workshops and conferences that led to trends like ‘responsible travel’ and ‘sustainable tourism’ have actually played their part in creating what I hope one day will be the norm and not the exception.”

We knew this already but Siem Reap has just been voted the best place to visit in Asia in the TripAdvisor “Best Destinations Poll”.   Cambodia is a fascinating place and Siem Reap really does give you a taste of everything – the dreadful and tragic recent history, the incredible ancient civilisations, extreme poverty, human warmth of spirit and a sense of hope for the future.  So if you were humming and harring about signing up to visit Cambodia then let this help you make your decision.  Remember our camp at Being Mealea is just 90 mins drive outside of Siem Reap so you will get to know this fantastic little town extremely well – and trust me you will also agree with TripAdvisor poll.

A month ago, Anth blogged about our work here  in support and partnerships of some amazing projects we have been involved in over the last few weeks.

Here’s the progress of the trial scientific initiative involving  Michael Galante, a doctorate student at the University of Edinburgh,  Scotland who has been been running experiments and collecting research with the Sabah Forestry Department and the State Government of Sabah.

Camps is endeavoring to incorporate professional scientific work within its already successful framework of gap and school year programs. Michael’s research examines the climate change mitigation potential through the implementation of a new forest policy that mandates the implementation of “reduced-impact logging” in all production forests in the State of Sabah, Malaysia. In doing so, Michael will quantify the volume of carbon before and after logging and thus, determine the amount of carbon “avoided” from entering the atmosphere.

Michael, in collaboration with the Sabah Forestry Department and assisted by Camp Borneo have recently established the inception sample plots in the production forest of Sabah Forest Industries, Sipitang Sabah. “These forest areas are some of the most extreme forest areas I have ever worked in” said Michael. “Plateauing at over 1,400m above-sea-level, these forest areas are very interesting to work in and will make fantastic examples of the potential of sustainable forest management and reduced-impact logging in the State of Sabah” he continued.

Camps specifically are assisting with logistical support, local assistants on data collection and camping equipment to complete the sampling in a timely fashion. The concept is to develop professional ties with local governments and international scientific research for the development of a Scientific Youth-Program which can be offered to Gap-year and school expedition programs. While continuing the trend of ethical journeys, the program aims to broaden the scope of available programs to those individuals who are keen to learn more about the field of natural resource management, scientific education, discovery and evaluation.

While this is just the beginning of development phase of the program, we believe that this work can have lasting impact on the lives of those whom participate, specifically those wishing to pursue an academic science related field of study.