The best way to experience Africa is to experience it with the people who call it home.
When we travel, it is easy to become focused on where we are going, what we are going to see, where we are going to stay and which experiences we want to fit into our itinerary. We think about the safari, the wildlife, the landscapes, the photographs and the places we have dreamed about visiting, but there is another question I think we should ask ourselves before we go: who is actually benefiting from our visit? Every time we spend money while travelling, we make a choice about where that money goes. We choose where to sleep, who takes us into the bush, where we eat, what we buy and which experiences we book. Those decisions may seem small individually, but collectively they can have a genuine economic impact on the communities we visit.
Across Africa, tourism supports employment, businesses and livelihoods, and when more of the money generated through tourism remains within the communities where that tourism takes place, the benefits of our visit can extend well beyond our own experience. Responsible tourism encourages travellers to use local guides and businesses, purchase locally made products and seek out experiences that create genuine economic opportunities for people living in the destinations they visit. But for me, there is something much more important behind all of that. It is about people.
One of the best decisions you can make when travelling in Africa is to choose a good local guide, and I don’t simply mean someone who knows how to drive you from one place to another or locate the next wildlife sighting. A great guide can completely change the way you experience Africa because they know the landscape in a way that a visitor simply cannot. They understand the wildlife, the seasons, the weather, the tracks and the sounds, and they know when to stop, when to wait and when it is time to move on. Sometimes they know the landscape because they have spent years working in it, and sometimes because it is quite literally home.
One of the people I had the privilege of interviewing for I HEART AFRICA PROJECT was Andrew Danckwerts, whose relationship with the African wilderness began when he was a child growing up in Zambia. Andrew grew up in Choma, surrounded by wild places, and spent his childhood exploring the natural world around him before eventually entering guide training and building a career that would take him across much of the continent, including Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. That isn’t simply a job. That is a lifetime of knowledge. When you sit in a safari vehicle or walk through the bush with someone who has spent years learning that environment, you aren’t simply paying for transportation. You are being given access to a way of seeing the landscape that you could never develop from a guidebook alone.
Andrew spoke particularly passionately about walking safaris and the different relationship they create between people and the wilderness. A vehicle can take you through a landscape, but walking through it with a skilled guide can make you experience that same landscape in an entirely different way. He described walking safari guiding as an art and spoke about the importance of creating a connection between people and the wild, while also recognising the responsibility guides and visitors have towards wildlife. That is why choosing the right guide matters so much. It isn’t simply because they can help you find the animals. It is because they can teach you how to be in their world without behaving as though it belongs to us.
I think sometimes we forget just how much we rely on the people who make our travels possible. There is the person driving the vehicle, the guide walking beside you, the person preparing your food, the receptionist welcoming you, the boat operator taking you across the river, the ranger protecting the reserve and the person who knows which road to take when the rain arrives. There is someone who knows the history of the village you are passing through and someone who understands the landscape because they have spent their entire life there. These people are not background characters in your holiday. They are part of the experience.
That is why, when you are choosing a safari, tour or other experience, it is worth looking beyond the photographs and asking who will actually be taking you into the landscape. Is the guide from the area? Do they have appropriate training? Do they know the environment? Does the operator invest in its guides? Does the community benefit from the experience? These questions don’t make a trip less enjoyable. In many cases, they can make it considerably more meaningful, because the person beside you may be the difference between simply seeing a place and beginning to understand it.
Where you stay matters too. Africa has extraordinary accommodation ranging from small family-run guesthouses to community-owned lodges, camps and larger safari properties, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting comfort or even luxury when you travel. Responsible travel does not mean that you have to give up the things you enjoy. It simply means that, when you have a choice, you can consider looking for accommodation that genuinely employs local people, sources products and services locally and contributes to the community around it.
A locally owned guesthouse can mean that your money goes directly to a family. A lodge employing people from nearby communities can create employment and help develop skills. A camp purchasing food from local producers can support farmers, while a business using local suppliers and services can keep money circulating within the local economy. It is the cumulative effect of these decisions that matters, because tourism does not automatically benefit the communities where it takes place. Those benefits need to be deliberately created, supported and sustained. So rather than asking only where can I stay?, perhaps we should also ask who does my stay support?
Food offers another wonderfully simple way to connect with a place. One of the things I have always loved about travelling is that food can tell you something about the people who live there, their traditions, their environment and the things that have shaped their communities over generations. Try the local restaurant. Eat what local people eat. Visit a market. Talk to the person preparing your food. Try something you have never heard of before. You don’t have to understand every ingredient or know the history behind every dish. Sometimes you simply have to be willing to try something new and allow the experience to become part of your understanding of the place.
And when you eat at a locally owned restaurant rather than automatically choosing an international chain, your money can go directly into another local business. That might support the owner, their employees, the person supplying the vegetables, the farmer producing the ingredients or an entire network of people you will never meet. That is one of the beautiful things about local economies: one choice can travel much further than you realise.
The same is true when you buy something while travelling. I have always believed souvenirs are better when they mean something, so rather than buying something mass-produced simply because it has the word “Africa” written across it, look for something that has a story behind it. Buy from the person who made it if you can. Visit the artisan. Ask about their work. Learn where it came from. Find out why they make it and, if you love it, buy it.
Traditional crafts and locally made products can provide important income for artisans and small businesses, but there is another part of responsible purchasing that I think deserves just as much attention: pay a fair price. Responsible travel does not mean trying to get everything as cheaply as possible. There is a difference between being aware of local prices and deliberately driving down the price someone is asking for work that may have taken hours, days or even weeks to create. If somebody has developed a skill and spent their time making something by hand, that skill has value, and allowing it to have value is part of respecting the person behind the product.
There is also a difference between visiting a community and genuinely connecting with the people who live there. A community should never be treated as a tourist attraction simply because visitors are curious about it. If you are invited into someone’s community, approach that invitation with respect. Learn something before you arrive, listen to the people you meet, follow local guidance around photography and understand that not every part of someone’s life exists for you to photograph, film or share online. Most importantly, don’t arrive believing that you already understand the people you are meeting. You don’t. That is the point of travelling. To learn.
Meaningful community involvement is one of the foundations of responsible tourism because successful tourism initiatives should not simply be imposed upon communities for the benefit of visitors. Local people should have opportunities to participate, shape the experiences taking place around them and benefit from the tourism economy. There is an enormous difference between seeing people and meeting people, and I think responsible travel asks us to move towards the latter.
Supporting local communities is also closely connected to conservation, and this is something Andrew Danckwerts spoke about strongly when I interviewed him. For Andrew, conservation was never simply about animals. It was about the relationship between wildlife, wild places and the people living alongside them. He saw local communities as a major part of conservation and believed that without community involvement and support, conservation efforts would struggle over the long term. He also saw sustainable tourism as having an important role in connecting people with the wild, educating visitors and helping them understand how they can contribute to its protection.
That idea is important because responsible tourism becomes much bigger than simply choosing an environmentally conscious hotel. When communities have meaningful opportunities to benefit from tourism, tourism can become part of a much larger relationship between people, land and wildlife. A community that gains employment, business opportunities, training and income from a protected landscape has a tangible reason to see that landscape as valuable, while travellers have an opportunity to understand that conservation is not something happening separately from the people who live there.
Of course, this does not mean every tourism project that uses words such as community, authentic or local is automatically responsible. That is why we need to look a little more closely at the businesses we choose. Before you book, ask who owns the business, who employs the people, where the money goes, whether local people are involved in the experience, whether guides are properly trained and fairly compensated, whether the accommodation employs people from nearby communities, whether local products and services are being used and whether the community has a genuine voice in the tourism experience.
You don’t need to become an expert in responsible tourism to ask those questions. In fact, you don’t need to interrogate every business you encounter. But if an operator cannot explain its relationship with the surrounding community or provide even basic information about how local people benefit, that is worth considering before you hand over your money. Transparency matters, and a genuinely responsible business should be able to explain its connection with the community rather than simply using responsible-tourism language as a marketing tool.
I think the simplest way to look at all of this is to remember that your money has a story. Every dollar, pound, euro or rand you spend while travelling has a destination of its own. Where does it go? Who receives it? What does it pay for? Does it remain within the community? Does it help someone employ another person? Does it support a family, an artisan, a guide or a local producer? Does it contribute towards protecting the place you have travelled so far to experience?
We often think about our holiday spending as one large expense, but it isn’t really. It is hundreds of individual decisions made over the course of a journey, and those decisions accumulate. You don’t have to change your entire trip or sacrifice everything you want to experience. Sometimes responsible travel is simply about making a slightly different choice when you have the opportunity.
Choose the local guide. Stay at the locally owned guesthouse. Eat at the family-run restaurant. Buy directly from the artisan. Book a community experience. Tip fairly. Ask questions. Listen. Learn. And when you find someone whose work makes your experience extraordinary, tell other people about them. Recommend them. Share their business. Give them the recognition they deserve. Supporting a local business does not always cost you anything extra. Sometimes it simply means choosing to spend your money differently.
When I look back at the people whose stories became part of I HEART AFRICA PROJECT, I don’t remember them simply as guides, rangers, tourism workers or people I interviewed for a book. I remember them as people with their own relationships with Africa, their own reasons for being there, their own experiences and their own stories. Andrew’s story is one example of that. His relationship with the wilderness began in childhood and eventually became a career that took him across some of Africa’s most extraordinary wilderness areas, reminding me that when we travel into these places, we are often stepping into landscapes that other people have spent their entire lives learning, protecting and understanding.
That changes the way I think about travel because perhaps the greatest thing we can give back when we visit Africa isn’t money alone. It is respect for the people who make our experience possible. It is recognising their knowledge, valuing their work, listening to their stories, choosing their businesses when we can and understanding that the Africa we fall in love with is not simply the landscape outside the vehicle window or the view from the lodge. It is the people who call that landscape home.
Africa doesn’t need travellers to arrive believing they are going to save it. It needs travellers who are willing to listen, learn, spend consciously, support local businesses, value local knowledge and respect local communities. Tourism works best when it isn’t simply a one-way transaction in which we arrive, take what we want and leave. It can be something much more meaningful when we arrive, meet people, learn from them, contribute to the places we are visiting and leave with a deeper understanding of the world we have just experienced.
That is what supporting local communities means to me. It isn’t charity, and it isn’t about guilt or trying to travel perfectly. It is simply recognising that when we travel through someone’s home, our choices matter. The guide who takes you into the wilderness matters. The person preparing your meal matters. The artisan making something by hand matters. The family running the guesthouse matters. The community living alongside the wildlife matters. And when we choose to support those people, we become part of a much more meaningful kind of tourism.
Because ultimately, the most responsible choice can also be the most rewarding one. Choose local. Meet the people. Hear their stories. And let them become part of your journey.
I HEART AFRICA PROJECT 