Wikipedia has the figures: “Adama Barrow’s special adviser Mai Ahmad Fatty alleged that in late January 2017, Jammeh had stolen $11.4 million from the state’s treasury and used a cargo plane to ship out his luxury vehicles during his last week in power. He added that the state’s treasury was virtually empty, which was confirmed by technicians in the Ministry of Finance as well as the Central Bank of the Gambia. About a month later, two senior ministers alleged that he had siphoned at least $50 million from social security, ports, and the national telecoms company. They also alleged that his private jet, which cost $4.5 million, was bought using the state’s pension fund. The government stated that his actions had left the country with a debt of more than $1 billion.” 

Returning to the Gambia, the scale of the change since Jammeh was exiled is immediately evident, the arrivals tax ($20) is collected efficiently and immigration is smooth, bags are already in the arrivals hall and customs quickly x-ray bags to counter smuggling. I confess to feeling a little nostalgic for the chaos of arrivals in the past. Gambia has changed.

Then to the car and the wide new tarred highways to the new hotel. There are miles of newly tarred roads, two flyovers completed, and the third nearing completion.

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At the airport, on arrival, there is a separate desk for people with residence certificates – it was busy when I arrived. There is a building frenzy with new residential and commercial properties being purchased by the diaspora and former holidaymakers as second homes. Revenues earned by letting these properties is unlikely to be remitted to the Gambia – the payment will go into accounts in the USA, UK and elsewhere.

The World Bank  2022 Poverty and Gender Assessment, reports that the national poverty rate declined from 48.6% in 2015 to 45.8% in 2019 but climbed again to 53.4 percent largely due to Covid-19 a trend exacerbated by food and other inflation caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 7 out of every 10 rural dwellers are poor; compared to 3 out of every 10 urban dwellers. However, the larger share of poor people lives in urban areas in the more populous Southwest, mainly in Brikama.

The challenge for the Gambia now is to ensure that the living standards of those living below the poverty line rise.

L’article The Gambia is booming, benefitting from tourism fuelled inward investment est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.

Whether you have been on holiday in The Gambia or not there is an opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of young women who have been exploited, trafficked or treated badly at the hands of others. You could help by donating money, or through volunteering, expertise, knowledge, and time.

Corporate Social Responsibility has evolved from corporate giving, where donations were made from profits to charitable good causes, generally with the benefit of tax breaks. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, there has been a significant shift as businesses have changed how they do business to benefit society. Hollander & Breen published The Responsibility Revolution in 2010, and in 2011 Sanford published The Responsible Business. These texts are markers of change as company strategies shifted from sharing a small proportion of profits to doing business in ways that create social value for communities, workers, customers and the environment. In 2011, Porter (of cluster theory) and Kramer published a paper in the Harvard Business Review on “Creating Shared Value.” At the heart of the concept and practice of shared value is the premise that the competitiveness of a company and the health of the communities that live around it are mutually dependent.

The proverb “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” has become a meme. The oldest English-language use of the proverb has been found in Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie’s novel, Mrs. Dymond (1885), in a slightly different form: “…if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish, you do him a good turn.”

Creating shared value or teaching a woman to fish requires resources, and philanthropy often plays an important part in creating social value. Corporates have the resources and capacity to engage without looking to others for funding, but not-for-profits, charities and community organisations generally do not – they have to look to aid programmes and charitable donations to teach a woman or man to fish.

When we travel, we can choose to put something back to benefit the communities we encounter; we can give fish or teach people to fish. If we do the latter, our philanthropy has a greater impact. There is an example of this approach in The Gambia. The Institute of Travel and Tourism of The Gambia is launching a new course, “No Woman Left Behind”, for young women who have been exploited, trafficked or treated badly at the hands of others. Fatou’s story speaks for all

“I was trafficked to Lebanon with the expectation that I was going to get a good job there. However, it was a different thing because when I got there I was working as a housemaid and a nanny, in which, I struggled so hard and it was so difficult for 3 years. My contract was supposed to end in 3 years but I escaped after the first year because I worked from 7am to 2am and I was treated inhumanely. When this project came my way, I was very happy to full fill my dreams because it’s a scholarship. The project, No Woman Left Behind, fulfilled my dream to have something I always wanted to do in life and I will have a skill and be certificated at the end of the project. The project also helped me to form an association to help other girls who returned back to the Gambia after being trafficked.”

The course has been running successfully for a year, funded by an international donor agency without local ties, but their priorities have changed. The tourism industry is weak after a very long period behind closed borders as a defence against Covid.

Students learn skills in cooking, pastry, food processing, and small business skills, together with an understanding of their human rights.

The first year was an outstanding success – the students have learnt cooking, hygiene, and patisserie skills and benefitted from the mentoring of many Gambian women involved in the hospitality industry – next year the course will develop a greater understanding of the skills needed to start a business, survive, and then thrive.

The goal is to ensure that they will learn skills and resilience techniques so that they and their children will not be exploited in the future.

The course is an experiential learning – learning by doing – course – so we need lots of practical exercises and in the future ITTOG, the college running this programme, plan to support the students starting their own micro-enterprises by enabling them to use college facilities and resources – there is already an equipped kitchen provided for the first phase of the project. This 8-week course for 30 women will cost £4000. This course will give these women a real chance to learn new skills, to help them make their own way in life, and to become self-reliant for themselves and their children.

Can you help with a donation or even a regular donation to help us meet our initial target?

If you can, then please donate here.

PeopleandPlaces is looking for volunteers to help contribute to course content and deliver some of that course content – rest assured, if you feel you do not have presentation or classroom skills your help in creating course content – be it in country or through or e-volunteer programme – will be invaluable.

If you’d like to learn more about this programme and how you can help, send an email to sallie@travel-peopleandplaces.co.uk

L’article Responsible Tourism requires more than Philanthropy est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.

Thanks to its ocean port and the river’s navigability deep into the continent, The Gambia has for centuries been a hub for different cultures as well as a trading post, including slave traffic. Arab merchants, Muslims, the Mali Empire, Portuguese, the Baltics, the Dutch, the French, the British – all at different times struggled for commercial and political dominion over the region. From the end of the 19^th century the British established a ‘protectorate’ there and The Gambia progressed towards independence. Gambians fought alongside the Allies during the Second World War, and finally gained independence in 1965 as a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth. From 1970 to the present the country has undergone further change, becoming a Republic and rejecting the Commonwealth and neo-colonial power. It requested to re-enter the Commonwealth in 2017.

The country has a historical reliance on subsistence agriculture and groundnut exports and has built a welcome for tourists with golden windswept beaches and a tropical climate, hot and rainy from June to November, dryer and cooler the rest of the year. Beware: cooler does not mean cool. I was there in April, arriving on a breezy overcast day whose clouds caught me out: I was fooled me into not wearing any sun protection and by the next day my back was as red as a lobster.

Fancy resort hotels exist if that’s your bag, plus smaller eco-resorts and camps. I stayed in a mid-range ocean-side place with a pool, a selection of restaurants and even a massage parlour on site. You could choose to relax and remain there for the duration, or you could walk along the beach to other nearby villages, encountering monkeys in the trees along the shore and fruit-sellers keen for you to sample their fresh mango. Local taxi drivers are available to take you on excursions. Ratty, a local DJ who doubles as a driver, took me to the market in Serekunda, which was full of colourful stalls under bright sunshine and a labyrinthine indoor market selling clothes, gadgets, jewellery and trinkets. Schoolchildren in white and blue uniforms played behind dusty courtyard walls.

At night there was entertainment in the hotel, but I wanted to see the real thing, not a show put on for tourists. Ratty took me to a party in a ramshackle building on the shore. A soundsystem blared. I danced – until the DJ’s freestyling began to reference Babylon and the oppressor, which seemed like a good time to leave.

Later in my stay, further inland, I visited Lamin Lodge. The earth along the south shore of the tidal river here is encrusted with oyster shells. Oysters are one of The Gambia’s main delicacies. A local guide took me in a canoe to mangrove swamps where we slipped quietly among other-worldly root-systems and he used his experienced eye to point out the flash of kingfisher feathers between the trees. (Birdwatching tours are a big part of the country’s tourist offering).

We tied up the canoe and splashed through shallows, feet sinking into unctuous silt, and emerged in a small settlement to drink ‘wine’ taken straight from a tap in a palm. A gargantuan silk cotton tree was also on the itinerary. Estimated to be around 800 years old, it has seen youngsters circumcised and lovers’ wedding vows within the elephantine folds of its grey trunk.

Another day saw a longer, more solemn trip to Kunta Kinteh (formerly James / St Andrew Island). A taxi ride filled with DJ Ratty’s music to Banjul, then a ferry shared with livestock across the wide river mouth to Barra, a further 30km drive and a final wordless boat trip, took me to this UNESCO-listed monument associated with the history of the slave trade.

On the Gambia’s northern shore sit the small towns of Albreda and Juffereh where children run bare-foot past the doors of the museum that tells the story of this place. Europeans built settlements and forts here and imprisoned kidnapped Africans, for whom Kunta Kinteh Island would provide a last glimpse of African soil.

All seemed to fall quiet as the small boat I was in approached the island. There was no one else there. At 3km, the outpost seems tantalisingly close to the shore and yet forbiddingly distant. Even if you could have escaped your slave shackles, that distance would have been a terrifying swim at a time when few knew how.

The island itself is shrinking and the once-imposing fort and cannons are heavily eroded. Wind whispered in the trees growing among the stones as I walked the garrison’s jagged silhouette. Defensive work is needed if visitors are to continue setting foot there to learn about the atrocities committed and the ‘rehabilitation’ of the island: when the British abolished the slave trade and began intercepting slave ships, it was to this place that victims stolen from all over the region were returned, in the expectation they would start new lives.

Back in Barra, the main ferry service across the Gambia River’s mouth to Banjul was delayed. Restless passengers waited, sprawled on the ground in the afternoon sunlight. Finally, Ratty suggested taking an alternate means of transport. Wearing a loose lifejacket and rib-to-rib with other passengers, I crossed the river for the fourth time that day, this time in a crowded local motorboat with a deep belly where others crouched, face-to-kneecap. There were so many of us aboard I’m not sure how we stayed afloat.

The wind whipped my hair and fellow commuters variously grinned or looked ill. I kept my eye on the horizon across the choppy estuary where the Atlantic meets The Gambia – a land of water, a land of oysters and of mangroves; a land of birds, of music, of migration. A land of history and a land moving into its future.

On arrival in Banjul, there was no wharf. A man waded into the water, threw me over his shoulder and carried me safely onto the sand.

L’article The Gambia: Africa’s smallest mainland Nation est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.