About

Summary

Since 2019 we have been working with two rural communities, both with exceptional biodiversity and which had been severely affected by the conflicts in Colombia. Together with E3 Group in Colombia and RHS Kew Gardens, we are developing tourist routes that promote forest protection and peacebuilding through community-based ecotourism.

The communities are in two of Colombia's most affected post-conflict regions. Serranía De Las Quinchas in Boyacá, deep in the Andes to the north of Bogota, is the centre of Colombia’s emerald mining and local communities had lived with decades of conflict from the ‘green wars’ and enforced coca production for the drugs barons. Up in the north, on the Venezuelan border, the villages of La Victoria and Estados Unidos in the Serranía del Perijá, were ravaged by the conflict between the FARC guerillas and the paramilitaries. In the first year of the program we also worked with an Afro-Caribbean community living in mangroves of Bocas del Atrato, in the Bay of Urabá, on the Panamanian border, who had moved there 50 years ago to escape the drug trafficking conflicts in the Darién Gap.

The local livelihoods of all these communities had become dependent on cutting down the rainforest for agriculture, logging or other unsustainable natural resource exploitation. This three year project has supported these communities to co-develop ecotourism plans, based on scientific research that identified new endemic species of plants and exceptional biodiversity. It uses community-led tourism to contribute to creating sustainable livelihoods and limiting deforestation to protect biodiversity-rich ecosystems.

Our Approach

The project has demonstrated the potential of community-based ecotourism in biodiversity hotspots as a means to reduce deforestation, avoid GHG emissions and strengthen peacebuilding. In each community the team co-developed ecotourism plans that include the latest scientific research on plant diversity and have designed marketable packages for national and international tour operators.

Acorn Tourism’s specific role was to visit the communities and assess the potential tourism offer, in order to identify which niche markets would be most interested in visiting these communities. We undertook detailed niche market analysis and produced niche market reports on Birding, Scientific, Academic, Volunteering and Education (SAVE) tourism and Community-led Nature Ecotourism. We also ran capacity building workshops with each community to develop their understanding of niche market segments and the types of visitor markets they would need to target.

In the second and third years of the project we have been building the capaicty of the communities to understand their target audiences and develop marketing skills. We have focused on the Training of Trainers from the local Peace Development Process (the PDPs) to ensure this knowledge is embedded lcoally. To build relationships with local travel agencies and hotels, we have coached the communities Tourism Committees to present their tours and host trade fam trips.  

Outcome

The niche market reports produced during the first year of the program profiled these target audiences, provided product development recommendations on how to meet their expectations and how to market to them. In addition, we also produced a guide on How to Set up and Run a Sustainable Tourism Business. This provided the communities with clear guidance about how they should develop their tourism offer to ensure it was sustainable and to show them how this could be evidenced.

This research was used for online and in-person training workshops with each of the communities. It guided the content created for the communities websites and social media channels, that have been developed to promote the tourism packages offered by each community. This knowledge and understanding of the target audiences has been the foundation of the Marketing Plans that were coproduced and delivered during the second and third years of the program. 

Over the three years of the project, the communities have developed their tours, been trained on their exceptional biodiversity and unique species, learned how to cook their indigenous plants and create exception local gastronomy. Tour guides have been trained and set up their own tour agencies and tours have been sold through their Instagram channels.