Equality in Tourism's Wamboma: women farming for their future

Equality in Tourism International is a global charity working to create lasting change within the tourism industry. We focus on advancing gender equality through research, training, advocacy and practical projects that improve opportunities for women both within tourism businesses and in local communities.

One of these projects is Wamboma Co-operative, based in Tanzania. Wamboma supports women to develop sustainable livelihoods through tourism, helping them build skills, generate income and have greater influence over decisions that affect their lives and communities. It's a brilliant example of how tourism, when approached thoughtfully, can be a genuine force for positive change.

Connecting Women Farmers with Kilimanjaro’s Tourism Industry

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. 

Transforming Women’s Lives

The project has now trained 150 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 women’s empowerment, to save by managing their own micro-finance group, and to work together as a co-operative, Wamboma: Women Farming For Their Future. 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. 

A priority in the project was to train hotels in the value of backward linkages to the community so that they would become partners in the enterprise and buy their produce from the co-operative.  Over 20 hotel managers received training on this and on the marketing opportunities it offered to their businesses.  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 we are rebuilding these relationships as there have been many changes in personnel. We anticipate a kite mark for an association of hotels linked to Wamboma and tours to the farmers to learn about their lives. 

The Wamboma Cultural Experience

The women now wish to share their stories with visitors and following the building of a cultural centre in Namwai village on the western slopes of Kilimanjaro, the Wamboma Cultural Experience is now a wonderful reality.

Visitors to Namwai are received with genuine joy and they spend the day on the farm, learning how to grow, harvest and make coffee, how to cook local food, how to hoe and farm, how honey is produced and how the women live their lives. All visitors are welcomed through a booking system managed by local partners, KWIECO.

The project was not intended to be merely a development project, but rather a sustainable business model with a comprehensive business plan. Key to its success is the desire to share the knowledge gained as widely as possible, so that women in other areas may also benefit from this experience. 

Please feel free to contact us for any further information you might want or to experience a tour.