Equality in Tourism International and women’s empowerment partners, the Tanzanian NGO Kilimanjaro Women’s Information and Education Community Organisation (KWIECO), initiated a ground-breaking women’s empowerment pilot project in 2018 to strengthen linkages between the lucrative Kilimanjaro tourism industry and the region’s subsistence farming industry. The rationale was to bring the women farmers and their families out of poverty by training them up to supply a new market of hotels and restaurants with locally produced produce.

The project’s goal is, in a holistic manner, to address challenges of poverty, women’s rights and climate change by sharing the learning of the Empowering Women Farmers Through Tourism pilot project to empower more women farmers in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa to access market opportunities in the fruit and vegetable value chains.  The learning would be inclusive of the women who have already benefited from it. 

The project has now trained 120 impoverished, marginalised women from three villages to farm well and to produce quality produce, to understand farming as a business, in entrepreneurship, to understand their rights as women and to save by managing their own micro-finance group and to work together as a co-operative. Annual monitoring and evaluation is very positive and the majority of the women and their families’ lives have been transformed.  Women who could not save half a dollar a week are now building brick homes and toilets and are respected in their communities.  They no longer compete against each other to sell at very low prices to dealers, who sell their produce on to the hotels, but work together to produce quality produce.

Even though climate change has destroyed crops with floods and drought, and even though the global pandemic resulted in the closure of hotels, the women and their families have shown resilience: for the first time they have food security and have been able to manage their own micro businesses.

The women are members of the Wamboma Co-operative and have a shop in Moshi town.  During the pandemic they created Tanzania’s first farm boxes and have created a website, WhatsApp group and Facebook page in order to market and sell their produce. https://wambomatz.org/  They were also trained to dry fruit and vegetables as an additional future enterprise supplying tour operators, visitors and hotels with packets of dried pineapple, mango and banana for treks and safaris.

A priority in the project was to train hotels in the value of backward linkages to the community.  Over 20 hotel managers received training on this and on the marketing opportunities it offered to their businesses.  We anticipated a kite mark for an association of hotels linked to Wamboma and tours to the farmers to learn about their lives.  The hotels were assured that they would be supplied with quality produce, at the quantities and consistency that they required, which has been fulfilled. With the closure of tourism because of the global pandemic there is a need to rebuild these relationships as hotels have closed, new managers appointed, and new businesses are forming which require the same training.