The project's aim is straightforward: build sustainable tourism that gives visitors a real way to help protect local nature, on the understanding that protecting it takes everyone working together. Before tourism offered any real employment here, emigration was the default option for anyone looking for work. Now, with jobs available closer to home, fewer people are leaving.
New economic activity has followed — cycling, horseback riding, hotels and restaurants, mountaineering and trekking. Profit from these gets split three ways: a share for the people working in tourism directly, a share reinvested in the project office, and a share for the wider community. Both the men and women selected to work in tourism are chosen by the community itself, and all receive training in nature and environmental stewardship — though broader tourism skills are still a gap they're working to close.
We locals do know best how to manage our nature. Let us manage the projects instead of the government.
Income from tourism, they hope, means a better future for local families directly — school for their children, and the chance for some of those children to become guides themselves, trained in languages like French and English to serve visitors better. The flip side: because farmers here don't sell directly at market and rely on middlemen instead, agricultural prices have actually dropped even as the cost of living, inflation included, has climbed for everyone, tourists included.
Government investment in local tourism promotion has been thin. What they'd really want is the freedom to manage conservation projects themselves rather than have money routed through national programmes that rarely reach the local level — a frustration behind their central ask: let the people who live with this land manage it.
The upside they're already seeing: renewed attention to preserving nature and water, since without it there won't be drinking water left in a few years. Tourism has also revived interest in half-forgotten sites and in traditional culture that outsiders' curiosity has helped local people re-value. Telephone lines, computers, internet, and fax have arrived along with it — practical infrastructure that wouldn't have come otherwise.
Their one practical request of visitors: rest a while at altitude before setting out on a tour, to avoid altitude sickness — and come ready to spend time with a community that's working hard to make that time worthwhile.