Our Responsible Travel Policy

At Bush Adventures, we aim to provide our guests with the best cultural travel experience in Kenya, and we plan to be able to do it for many years to come. Therefore we must ensure that the factors that enable us to deliver an unparalleled travel experience are preserved and enhanced. With our responsible travel policy we aim to:

• Help the local culture remain alive and thriving, with its values, lifestyle and traditions, in a time when it is challenged by changes in lifestyles, marginalization by other Kenyan tribes, land issues and environmental challenges like droughts and loss of habitat for its livestock

• Identify and put into practice the most effective ways to contribute to the well-being of the people who live in the area, helping them to preserve their lifestyle, encouraging self reliance, and avoiding dependency
• Minimize the impact that our operations and our guests have on the fragile environment of the area where we are based
• Ensure that our staff and our guests are aware of what we are trying to achieve and that they take part in our efforts, following our guidelines and coming up with suggestions to improve our standards

Economic responsibility

We aim to identify and put into practice the most effective ways to contribute to the economic well-being of the people who live in the area, helping them to be self reliant rather than becoming dependent on external handouts- in cash or in kind. Some examples of actions taken so far:

• Employing local staff whenever this is feasible. So far over 90% of our staff is from the community. All our trainers must be Maasai warriors from the area
• Purchasing local products and helping the local economy to develop:
  • We buy goats and fruits from local homesteads
  • We encourage local farmers to produce vegetables and fruits that we can buy from them, by providing seeds
  • We buy locally made traditional weapons for our activities from the elders in the area
• Promoting entrepreneurship and trade: we chose not to have a handicraft shop at the camp, instead when guests want to buy souvenirs, we ask ladies from the homesteads around us to come and sell their jewellery directly to them- we take no commissions
• Allocating spare, paid time of our staff to small projects, done with teams of local warriors, that benefit the community- e.g. road repairs, digging channels to stop water erosion
• Improving the quality of education for the children in the area by organizing volunteer teacher schemes for the local schools. We support the volunteers by helping them with logistics and accommodation

Environmental responsibility

We are based in the heart of the Ndorobo Maasai community, between Il Ngwesi conservancy and Isiolo district. It is a very arid territory, often affected by severe droughts.

As a company, in our operations we make every effort to minimize our impact on the area:

• We host a very small number of guests (max 8)
• We do not have running water at the camp: we fetch water with buckets from the river, we filter it mechanically and sterilize it for washing and cleaning
• We have in place procedures for washing and cleaning that ensure a high hygienic standard and at the same time a minimal usage of water
• We recycle water from washing to irrigate the shrubs and trees in the camp
• We do not have a generator for electricity: we use solar powered lights all around the camp. We use no fridges- we have developed menus that require minimal cooled ingredients and we  use only coolboxes and fresh produces
• We do not cut trees or buy charcoal (made by cutting trees) for our fire/cooking needs. We only use dead wood that we find in the vicinity of the camp
• We did not, and do not, cut any tree or shrub to accommodate our camp
• We use gas cylinders to cook and have a high-efficiency oven that uses coals
• We do not use vehicles in any of our activities. We only keep one car for emergencies and logistics
• We separate organic rubbish and compost it

We invite our guests to be as environmentally conscious as we are:

• Upon arrival, the trainers brief guests on how the camp is organized and on all the measures we take to minimize environmental impact
• During their activities, guests are briefed and trained on how to behave in the wild, to avoid disturbing wildlife and plants

 Our office practices aim to be environmentally sound as well

•  We avoid giving out printed brochures, emailing them in PDF instead, and we minimize the amount of printing we do
• We use only low energy light bulbs

Social responsibility

At Bush Adventures we are part of the local community and would like to help its culture remain alive and thriving, with its values, lifestyle and traditions. We also aim to enable our guests to gain an in-depth understanding of Maasai culture, and our hope is that they will come to regard it as highly as we do

• Upon arrival, our trainers give an extensive briefing to our guests, covering the main aspects of Maasai culture, the do’s and don’ts for social interactions, as well as the main environmental and social issues that guests need to be aware of to minimize their negative impact on the area
• Our guests are always accompanied by our team of  trainers (all warriors from the area), both during activities and at the camp. Trainers also act as cultural mediators when guests meet people from the community: they ensure a better understanding between guests and community and they advise guests on how to best respect local customs and social norms
• In all our activities, our trainers teach our guests their traditional skills, placing them into context, and making guests try out each of them. In this way we aim to give guests an unusual, highly enjoyable experience and at the same time allow them to gain an in depth understanding of  the challenges faced by warriors in their daily lives
• Our trainers spend most of their time talking about their culture, their experiences, their values and traditions- as well as discussing the challenges that the Maasai community is now facing. This creates innumerable occasions for a true exchange of ideas and delivers significant insights into Maasai culture
• We offer guests the opportunity to visit the local schools where we run a volunteer- based teacher support scheme

We are also aware that for the culture to keep thriving, the community has to  tackle the big issues that are threatening its survival. We believe we can help with this through awareness building and through some focused short-term interventions aimed at filling capacity gaps. With all our staff, young warriors from the area, we have identified the main challenges that the culture is facing and have devised ways to help overcome them.

The most pressing issues that have been identified, and the responses that we have adopted are:

Brain drain

As the most gifted young warriors progress to the highest levels of Kenyan schooling system, they lose touch with their culture because they do not have time to practice the skills and move on to city jobs, and they lose pride in it because of marginalization of pastoralist cultures by the dominant tribes. We help reverse this trend by giving educated warriors jobs that require them to practice their traditional skills and lifestyle, as well as constantly talk about their cultural heritage. They spend time explaining it and deepening their understanding and knowledge of it through the many questions that guests pose. They are becoming role models for the youth in the area.

Access to good quality education

Local schools are far from towns and struggle to recruit teachers, let alone good ones. This in turn deprives local children of the opportunity to good primary education. Without good primary education, children have very limited opportunities to access good secondary education and skilled jobs. We help to improve the quality of education for the children in the area by organizing volunteer teacher schemes for the local schools. We support the volunteers by helping them with logistics and accommodation

Land issues

The local community’s land is being threatened of expropriation, and the community is having difficulties in asserting its rights through appropriate channels because there is a shortage of educated people who can follow up on the issues. We have helped the community recruit a lawyer that will assist them, and we help them liaise with his office to make sure he can work at his best for them.

Environmental challenges

We are in a territory prone to increasingly frequent, long and severe droughts. There are raising number of people and livestock in the area, both because of organic population growth, and because of the encroaching of other communities with different lifestyles.  We see how this threatens not only the local wildlife and vegetation, but the very Maasai lifestyle as well. At the same time, any significant action to alter this trend has to come from the community so we are focusing our efforts on building awareness. 

• We hold meetings with our staff and the community around us to discuss how their traditional pastoral lifestyle is being affected by these changes, and how it contributes to the changes: overgrazing is a major factor that worsens the impact of droughts.
• We encourage the community to look for a trade off that is sustainable and comfortable for them, between maintaining their lifestyle and facing these challenges.

Raising the profile of our culture with our guests

We showcase our culture, traditions and values to our guests through all the activities that we do with them: they experiment in person our lifestyle, they get to know and understand our values and principles, and by the time they leave they have developed a strong admiration for our way of life as well as a clear idea of what is threatening it. We believe that this way we will have a pool of powerful advocates for our community around the world.