eosvisions

Overview

Beyond our educational travel and destination management services, we regularly involve ourselves as advisors, consultants and project developers relating to tourism, conservation and development.

We are currently engaged by the new German International Cooperation Agency GIZ that now encompasses three former agencies, the German Technical Cooperation GTZ, the German Development Service DED and Capacity Building International INWENT. In collaboration with the Congolese Wildlife Authority ICCN, we work with the leadership of Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the DR Congo’s South Kivu Province to develop tourism, marketing and monitoring activities for the park.

In the past, we have further teamed up with a range of partners such as Care International, DED, European Commission, GTZ, Mirovni Peace Institute, UN Millennium Villages Project and USAID. Among others, we have used these types of collaboration to further our own ‘more-than-profit’ philosophy by creating a series of signature educational community-based tourism experiences across East Africa. These projects aim at bringing certain themes to the attention of educational travelers in the region, while, at the same time, providing alternative sources of income to participating local partners. Among others, they relate to development challenges and interventions, gender issues, the plight of historically marginalized people, or the production of exotic agricultural products (coffee, tea, sugar, palm oil, cashew nuts etc). This way, our educational travel customers benefit from unique, authentic and intimate local experiences, and contribute to the creation of an entrepreneurship spirit, a tremendous amount of pride, and significant local income.

Features

We have assembled strong in-house expertise and know-how in the following areas:

• Conception and development of educational community-based tourism projects and related excursions: Community mobilization, product creation through appreciative participatory planning and action, trainings, installation of transparent benefit sharing mechanisms, market research, creation of market access, operation of excursions
• Participatory development and management plans (e.g. for national parks)
• Guidance of multi-stakeholder public-private-partnerships (e.g. to re-launch tourism in post-conflict areas)
• Trainings and workshops: Customer service, team building, guiding, hygiene, catering, hospitality management, cooperative management, environmental management, GPS/GIS
• Conception and implementation of marketing strategies
• Research services

Case studies

GIZ and ICCN – development of tourism, marketing and monitoring activities for Kahuzi-Biega NP:
Located in the eastern part of the DR Congo in the mountains south-west of Lake Kivu, Kahuzi-Biega National Park has gained world heritage status from the UNESCO for its natural richness in flora and fauna. The birthplace of gorilla tourism in 1973, the park today boasts of 13 different primate species including the rare eastern lowland gorillas as well as chimpanzees. Due to civil wars in the region and general insecurity, conservation measures and tourism activities suffered greatly in recent decades. But since security has returned in a significant part of the park, the Congolese Wildlife Authority ICCN in collaboration with its international partners believes that the time has come for the professional development of tourism, marketing and monitoring activities. Since the end of 2009, Eos Visions has been hired in four consecutive consultancies to support this process, and our current contract gives us a wide range of responsibilities for the entire year 2011, including touristic product development, the conception and implementation of marketing and communication strategies, the creation of professional databases, and the training of park staff in research and monitoring, including the usage of GPS and GIS.