Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge
Street Address
Adjacent to Parc National des Volcans
City
Kigali
State/Province
Postal/Zip Code
Country
Rwanda
Year innovation began
2007
Geotourism Challenge Addressed by Entrant
Quality of benefit to the people of the desitination
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Indicate sector in which you principally work
Conservation/Preservation organization
Geographic location
Rural, Mountain, Rainforest.
Main insight addressed
Establish community incentives
Name Your Project
Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge
Describe Your Idea
What is the goal of your innovation?
To give local communities near Virunga National Park a stake in conserving Rwanda's highly endangered mountain gorilla population and the forests it inhabitats.
How does your approach support or embody geotourism?
Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge puts mountain gorilla tourism to work on behalf of people, so both conservation and economic objectives are met. A unique collaboration between the African Wildlife Foundation, the local community, and a leading private operator, the lodge is owned by SACOLA, a Rwandese community trust with conservation and socioeconomic development objectives. SACOLA, which represents 6,000 households in the area, will use rental and other income from Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge to achieve its conservation and socioeconomic objectives. The lodge also provides direct benefits to the local community in the form of jobs (about 70 percent of the staff are from nearby communities) and invites Rwandan artisans and performers to entertain guests and showcase their cultural handicrafts, promoting valuable cultural exchanges. The lodge itself is a high-end 16-bed facility that attracts wildlife enthusiasts dedicated to conservation and willing to travel thousands of miles to view mountain gorillas, one of the world’s most endangered great apes.
Describe your approach in detail. How is it innovative?
The Virunga Volcanoes and Bwindi forest shelter are home to the last remaining mountain gorilla populations. There are only about 700 mountain gorillas left in the world, and the species is highly endangered. These forests, meanwhile, are under threat as population growth continues to increase in the surrounding areas, putting pressure on resources and creating ever-greater competition for land. As communities seek to make ends meet, park resources suffer, habitat is degraded, and gorillas are exposed to disease and other health risk. Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, a community lodge run by a private investor and financed with a mix of donor funding and credit financing, is designed to give the community a stake in conservation. AWF raised lodge construction costs from government and private donors and created an interest-free financing community development financing component to fully vest the community in the lodge's success. In addition to receiving a portion of guest fees and other income, the community retains ownership of the land on which the lodge is constructed plus all buildings and fixed assets.
The lodge itself promotes environmentally-friendly activities and minimizes energy consumption and water usage, and promotes recycling. By staying at Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, guests sustain efforts to conserve mountain gorillas while contributing to the well-being of the community and improving area residents’ quality of life. In addition to enjoying first-class accommodations and unique access to mountain gorilla viewing, visitors to Sabyinyo Silver Back Lodge learn about local culture, are entertained by local performers, have an opportunity to purchase Rwandan handicrafts, and are exposed to Rwandan culture through the highly engaged staff.
What types of partnerships or professional development would be most beneficial in spreading your innovation?
Marketing partnerships that promote Sabyinyo’s facilities and tourism activities in the area as
well as technical partnerships that promote knowledge sharing and add value to the services and benefits already in place. Such partnerships could promote skills training, capacity building and knowledge-exchange visits.
In one sentence describe what kind of impact, change, or reform your approach is intended to achieve.
To improve community well-being and sustain efforts to conserve mountain gorillas and their habitat while providing guests with a first-class tourism experience.
Describe the degree of success of your approach to date. Clearly define how you measure quantitative and qualitative impact in terms of how your approach contributes to the sustainability or enhancement of local culture, environment, heritage, or aesthetics? How does your approach minimize negative impacts? 200 words or less
Each time a guest stays at the hotel $50 goes to the community. At the end of the month, SACOLA also receives 7.5 percent of the gross sales from Sabyinyo. In just five months of operation, the lodge generated 8,000,000 million Rwanda francs (almost $15,000), which is being invested by SACOLA in a road so local workers and visitors can easily access the lodge and local goods can be transported more efficiently. As the lodge grows its business and becomes more well-known, it is expected to generate an increasing revenue stream that can be used for water projects, health care, and education. The lodge itself promotes environmentally-friendly activities, minimizes energy consumption and water usage, and promotes recycling. The chalets, which are very private and comfortable, showcase artwork from Rwanda, Cameroon and the Congo. Treks to find one of the seven gorilla families that dwell near the lodge depart from a base camp. Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge is featured on Condé Nast Traveller's The Hot List 2008, which says it ranks as one of the world's "most stylish, most innovative, most luxurious hotels."
How does your program promote traveler enthusiasm, satisfaction, and engagement with the locale?
Silverback Lodge is designed to provide customers with accommodations equal to the rarefied experience of viewing mountain gorillas. The rooms are spacious and private, and each has a shady veranda that feature striking views of the volcanoes. In the evening, guests can interact with the neighboring community through traditional dancing, visits to a local curio shop, and by interacting with local staff. Sabyinyo has also begun working with local artisans to produce Rwandan crafts that can be purchased by lodge guests. Lodge staff are helping to design a tour of local culture, such as blacksmiths, local brewing facilities, traditional healers, and bee keeping as well as visits to natural attractions such as caves. As noted above, Conde Naste describes Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge as one of the most innovative accommodations of 2008.
Describe how your innovation helps travelers and local residents better understand the value of the area’s cultural and natural heritage, and educates them on local environmental issues. How do you motivate them to act responsibly in their future travel decisions?
Visitors receive literature about the lodge, its partners, and its conservation and community development objectives. Lodge staff, the protected area authority staff, and selected community guides also educate guests on the area’s ecosystem and the ecological importance of the forest. All tourists visiting the area are briefed about Rwandan culture and the way they are expected to conduct themselves when they visit the mountain gorillas and the community. The experience educates guests about conservation, mountain gorillas, and the region, and motivates visitors to support such conservation enterprises in other areas.
In what ways are local residents actively involved in your innovation, including participation and community input? How has the community responded to or benefited from your approach?
SACOLA, a community association, conceived and built the lodge with strategic support from AWF. Over 300 local workers helped construct the lodge, which is located in a hilly area inaccessible by car. Now that the lodge is open for business, local people work at the lodge, supply the lodge with fresh local foods, and are benefiting from the initial investment in the infrastructure of the area needed to make tourism viable. Guest fees and other income are reinvested to meet the conservation and socioeconomic objectives of SACOLA. Local performers entertain guests and local artisans can showcase their work. The lodge gives the community incentive to conserve mountain gorillas by providing income, jobs, and cultural exchanges that offset the costs of forgoing other non-conservation land uses such as logging and agribusiness.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Is your initiative financially and organizationally sustainable? If not, what is required to make it so? What is the potential demand for your innovation?
The lodge is self-sustaining and is expected to begin generating a profit after the initial investment in constructing the lodge is paid off. The private operator will ensure the lodge is run efficiently and professionally, while SACOLA will ensure that community revenues are reinvested for the benefit of local people.
How is your initiative currently financed? If available, provide information on your finances and organization that could help others. Please list: Annual budget, annual revenue generated, size of part-time, full-time and volunteer staff.
The investment outlay for Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, which opened in August 2008, was as follows: US$550,000 -- grant from USAID and African Wildlife Foundation; US$200,000 -- loan from a private investor; $250,000 -- loan from the private operator that manages the lodge.
What is your plan to expand your approach? Please indicate where/how you would like to grow or enhance your innovation, or have others do so.
AWF is working to expand our approach to mountain gorilla tourism in the two other countries where mountain gorillas are found: the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. A similar lodge is being constructed in Uganda and is expected to open later this year. Security concerns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have delayed plans for similar projects to open. AWF encourages other organizations to adopt such models and works with both private and public sector partners to ensure such enterprises are self-sustaining and benefit both wildlife and the people who make it possible to conserve critical habitats. Our work in these countries builds on our conservation enterprise program throughout Africa.
What are the main barriers you encounter in managing, implementing, or replicating your innovation? What barriers keep your program from having greater impact?
This approach requires private sector participation, and in remote regions it is difficult to find investors willing to take a chance on conservation tourism. There also tends to be limited infrastructure both for development and financing in such areas. The process of getting the private sector and communities to work together can also be time consuming.
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers' marketing material.
I was born and raised in Kenya and joined AWF four years ago. In leading AWF's Conservation Enterprise Program across Africa, I work to ensure that projects with high conservation value ultimately benefit the people living alongside wildlife and give communities incentive to continuing conserving Africa's rich natural heritage for future generations.
What is the origin of your innovation? Tell your story.
As the leading international conservation organization focused solely on Africa, AWF believes that protecting Africa’s wildlife and wild landscapes is the key to the future prosperity of Africa and its people. Yet many rural public and community lands in the wildlife-rich areas AWF has identified as essential to conserving Africa’s natural legacy – its African Heartlands -- face a simple dilemma: find a creative way to allow wildlife to pay its own way or convert the land to some other form of production. AWF’s conservation enterprise strategy demonstrates that local communities and public landholders can undertake business ventures that support both their livelihoods and wildlife conservation. Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge is the latest example of AWF’s strategy being put into practice. It was conceived through AWF’s work in the Virunga Heartland, which features the last remaining habitat of one of the world’s rarest primates, the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei). This charismatic animal is the flagship species for the conservation of the entire array of wildlife and habitat that make up this unique part of the planet. AWF has been working to protect mountain gorillas for several decades, funding important research and working to ensure the survival of the mountain gorilla since the late 1970s. This important work has continued in spite of extraordinary circumstances. The human suffering during the Rwandan civil war of the 1990s was incalculable, but without the intervention and continued support of AWF and its partners, the victims of war might also have included the mountain gorilla.
Please write an overview of your project. This text will appear when people scroll over the icon for your entry on the Google map located on the competition homepage.
Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge is a unique project that gives communities ownership of a first-class facility designed to conserve the highly endangered mountain gorilla in the Virunga volcanic range while bettering community well-being and creating incentive to meet and build on conservation goals. Through SACOLA, the community association that owns Sabyinyo, the lodge has both improved the livelihoods of residents in the region and contributed in a meaningful way to the conservation of the mountain gorilla and its fragile habitat.
 | ger gerg said: tiffany jewelry Choose, buy and shop for on sale tiffany jewelry including Tiffany & Co Silver Necklace, Pendants, Bangles, Bracelets, ... about this idea. - 75 days ago read more > |
| Stephanie Colson said: The Rangers patrolling the park with the money raised help them also in their need of supplies such as GPS,Guns, Food, Tents and other ... about this idea. - 676 days ago read more > |
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