WAPONI is a business incubator aimed at providing small community-based tourism initiatives in Ecuador and Peru with the market access and skills to compete and thrive. These businesses have sustainability at their core, adhere to high standards of environmental and socio-cultural respect, and have tourist and local population involvement/engagement.

Problem

WAPONI is designed to address three specific problems. The first is a lack of income and economic opportunity in local communities. This often leads to overexploitation, and even a complete disregard for water and other natural resources. This is further compounded by a lack of knowledge about the impacts overexploitation has on the sustainability of the communities themselves. The second is the protection of the local environment in a general sense: the conservation of water supplies, fishing grounds, coastal mangrove forests, rainforests and their biodiversity. The community projects were designed to solve these problems by providing a financial motive for the conservation of resources. The idea has proven sound and the projects have instilled a new sense of environmental responsibility in the communities. The third problem, the one that WAPONI aims to solve by bringing these communities and their projects together under one banner, is the financial instability caused by their lack of both marketing capacity and the expertise necessary to appropriately manage and operate their geotourism enterprises in the initial stages.

Solution

WAPONI is a unique initiative because it offers business development consulting services to small community based tourism initiatives, the market and social investors. WAPONI aims to strengthen the operations and the market reach of individual projects that lack the expertise and network to reach the sometimes elusive demand looking for new product in the crowded international travel marketplace.

Example

- It offers its members a promotional and marketing platform that matches the projects with both social investors and the market segment. - It offers consumers a single gateway to truly sustainable, authentic experiences, whose operational and quality standards are guaranteed by WAPONI in coordination with well known certification seals. - It creates a collaborative forum for projects, social investors and donors. Selected projects that promise high quality tourist experiences as well as strong ROI, positive impacts in host communities and protection of the environment can showcase themselves as part of an incubator scheme. Donors or social and environmentally concerned investors and companies can contribute to help them raise their standards and meet WAPONI criteria, which will enable the projects to become part of an efficient commercial network, thus creating a positive loop for all stakeholders: the small businesses, the investors, the market and other WAPONI members.

Marketplace

WAPONI seeks to bridge two different worlds – tourism/business and communities. WAPONI speaks both languages…few others do. We believe that the real challenge is to get ecotourism with local communities to be competitive, so far these small rural enterprises aren't part of the market, these are all peers struggling to find their own space.