The ASF team has decades of experience linking rural development to conservation and eco-tourism.

Its mission is to facilitate rural economic growth, community ownership, skills development and job creation through responsible and proactive forms of tourism and conservation. It follows a rights-based approach that facilitates the pro-poor impacts of nature-based tourism. It emphasises the role of women as positive agents for long-term change in rural communities. It increases the flow of tangible benefits into the households of local residents via ownership, skills development, fair wages and supply contracts. It does this in partnership with local community-based organisations that encourage fair and equitable distribution of such benefits to their members.

What the African Safari Foundation does?

• Develop skills that lead to jobs in the ecotourism or conservation sector and their related businesses;
• Promote linkages between eco-tourism enterprises and local suppliers of goods and services;
• Assist communities to get ownership or control of high-value conservation land;
• Provide planning, transaction advice and mediation services for businesses on community-held conservation land;
• Facilitate grants and long-term loans to fund community ownership of lodges and other profitable tourism enterprises;
• Help set up and support community-based organisations that encourage sound governance and the fair distribution of benefits to local residents, especially poor and marginal groups;
• Promote the adoption of responsible labour and environmentally responsible business practices;
• Contribute to biodiversity conservation by demonstrating the long-term value of undisturbed wilderness to local residents;
• Document lessons learnt from our projects so they can be extended to other sectors of the industry; and
• Lobby governments, industry associations, civil society organisations and others to adopt measures that enhance the ability of ecotourism operations to contribute to sustainable development.