On the surface of it, there is no obvious connection between elite netball, education on the island of Zanzibar and a dream safari getaway involving tented camps and lion-spotting on the coast of East Africa.
But when it is at its most impactful, the ripple effects of positive-impact tourism can reach far beyond the vacation itself.
Enter David Guthrie, co-founder of safari-specialists A Tent With a View. Guthrie set up the company with his business partner Masoud Kilanga over 30 years ago - and they recently launched a new trip in partnership with Much Better Adventures. It's set in Africa's largest national park, Nyerere, and Saadani on the Tanzanian coast, which Guthrie, Kilanaga and their team developed for tourism.
The key point is that we want people to feel that they can aspire to big things.
“It's a phenomenal place”, David says. Here, the African bush meets the Indian Ocean and turtles lay their eggs a stone’s throw from areas where lions roam and elephants gather in their hundreds. “It all evolved from there,” says Guthrie.
Today, his team has expanded to include around 90 people in total. All of the organisation’s young managers are Tanzanian, joining the company via their graduate recruitment program - which allows graduates to experience every aspect of the business before landing on a managerial position. “The key point is that we want people to feel that they can aspire to big things," says David.
Guthrie, Kilanga and their team are serious about that. So much so that they also started an elite netball academy for girls in Tanzania - with the aim of producing professionally contracted, world class athletes. And they are funding the education of some of Zanzibar’s most promising students, with the hope that in the years to come, some of those children could speak on UN Youth stages.
This isn’t a marketing exercise. There are no branded cars and the children on courts aren’t there to be photographed. The ‘why’ of it all is simple, but human.
“We’re tired of people in Tanzania having nobody to look up to,” David says.
On the Court
“There's never been a female professional athlete from Tanzania in its history,” Guthrie tells me. “65 years, and not one professional athlete in any sport."
Tanzania recently sat 46th out of 47 nations in the world netball rankings, while their neighbours Uganda sat in 6th. The Tanzanian national team has since fallen off the ranking ladder altogether. But the aim at the new Tanzania Girls' Sports Academy in Simiyu - on the shores of Lake Victoria - is to see Tanzania not only enter the rankings again, but to get into that top 10 in the next eight years.
David continues: “We're talking about taking the best netballers in Tanzania, bringing in the best coaches from the UK - having the best facilities, and throwing the kitchen sink into making them into superstars. So that Tanzania could be in the World Cup one day, challenging the best teams in the world.”
The task is not an easy one - and first, boundaries will have to be broken down.
What we focus on is creating elite sportswomen. Girls who can go and get professional contracts; believe in themselves; be superstars.
George Zakaria, Head of Sport at Mwagindi Primary School in Tanzania, sums up the cultural issues which need addressed. "Many communities here do not believe there is advantage in sport," he says. "Even in our school, we are struggling a lot with advising parents to leave their children to play. But girls who are put at home for domestic activities - they don't have time to play or practise sport, so giving this chance to them will change our community."
The Academy itself is a purpose-built facility including a four-floor clubhouse and proper netball hard courts. Maggie Birkinshaw - an ex England international player and former coach of Superleague team Leeds Rhinos - is also involved in the project, scouting and developing players and coaches in the community.
An online documentary tracked Birkinshaw's talent-search across Tanzania. She took a 12-day road trip around the country, including to remote Maasai communities in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. "It's no secret that the Maasai are strong, they are tall and they can jump very high - quite a few of the qualities that I as a coach would look for in players," Birkinshaw says in the film.
"It's really clear that [sporting] opportunities in Tanzania, particularly for the girls, are next to none," the coach also notes. "[For] most girls, once they get to a certain stage where school ends, sport ends. There is nothing to transition onto. This Academy will give that opportunity for that transition from school."
It will also offer educational opportunities for players.
Birkinshaw goes on to add: "What we're trying to create is the opportunity for these girls to learn netball from the strategic side as well as the technical side. They will also be given a full education, which a lot of these girls may not be able to have. Some of these girls, when they get to 13, cannot afford to pay for education, so their learning then comes to an end. The Academy is looking to offer a holistic approach to every single athlete. So it's not just about the netball."
For Guthrie, the project is one with a clear aim. “What we focus on is creating elite sportswomen," he says. "Girls who can go and get professional contracts; believe in themselves; be superstars. And then other girls and mums will watch them on TV because suddenly there will be a Tanzanian girl playing netball.
“You can see how you could start a snowball effect. We’ve gone into these small areas with real energy to see if we can create superstars, and make more girls believe that they could do the same as well. We see the disappointment for people here, the lack of self-belief, and so we’ve identified this project on the sporting front and another on the academic front - to provide opportunities.”
In the Classroom
The academic project Guthrie mentions is the Zanzibar Sustainability Champions programme, which strives for similar success in the classroom.
In the coastal town of Nungwi, where A Tent With a View operates its Zanzibari hotel, government school classrooms routinely hold hundreds of students. Attaining a grade E - the lowest available - is considered a good outcome for local students. Receiving a grade C is exceptional, while anything better is unheard of.
“Because classrooms are generally 100 to 200 students, there's no space and no way to learn,” says David. “So if you get anything other than a fail in any exam, you're probably a real superstar.”
A Tent With a View identified a handful of children from north Zanzibar who had managed, against these odds, to register good grades in their year four exams.
“Then we gave them private tuition once a week, and they learned about sustainability as well as maths, science and English,” says David.
The students took the entrance exam of the best private school in the area. 11 passed, and A Tent With a View is now paying for their education through school, all the way to A-Levels. All the students have now finished their first year, and each came in the top half of their class. 7 of the 11 came in the top 15% . “They're all turning into environmental and sustainability superstars,” says Guthrie.
The children are writing essays on sustainable tourism in Zanzibar - what works and what doesn’t, Guthrie says. “I’m anticipating that in a few years, one or two will be on a stage at the UN Youth Sustainability Conferences. They're that good."
Impact Beyond Tourism
Travel operators have spent much of the past decade focused on reducing their footprint. Energy use, waste, carbon emissions, supply chains - and all of that is crucially important. But it’s also important tourism maintains an ongoing conversation with the communities where it takes place - and an open-minded approach to the ways it can, or cannot, help benefit those communities.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals cover 17 areas, including education, gender equality and economic opportunity - representing the myriad ways tourism can invest in communities, from the likes of schooling to netball. “When you feel passionate about a project, you go so much deeper with it,” Guthrie says.
The Saadani Lion and Turtle Project is another expression of this - a research programme run by A Tent With a View in partnership with Macalester College and Yale University, studying the behaviour of Saadani's coastal lion population.
It is the kind of finding that, once published, has the potential to [...] help protect the park and its wildlife from looming development.
The park’s lion den sits within a few hundred metres of nesting sea turtles, in a habitat under pressure from charcoal burning, industrial agriculture, coastal erosion and salt works.
The first phase of the research identified 12 individual lions and documented a remarkable pattern: Saadani lions appear to hunt giraffes far more frequently than is typical for the species. It is the kind of finding that, once published, has the potential to draw scientific attention to a park that has long been ignored - thus helping protect the park and its wildlife from looming development.
The site’s recognition as a tourist hotspot has the potential to do the same.
All of it - from the unique coastal lion population to the thriving school students and the netball academy - connect back to the same underlying conviction that the places we visit on adventures are not backdrops. They are living, breathing communities. If tourism is to benefit from those communities, and the landscape that they live in, it should come with tangible benefits for the people and place.
Check out our Safari to Shore Journey in Hidden Tanzania adventure now!