Edition 45: Winter 2008/9

Justin Francis, managing director of responsibletravel.com, believes Madagascar must embrace its people and culture as much as it does its endemic wildlife if tourism and – more importantly – conservation is to succeed.

Madagascar needs to decide how it wants to position itself as a tourist destination versus its more famous East African neighbours. The choice is simple: cater to its traditional market of French visitors, who enjoy it as a good value beach resort and biodiversity ‘hotspot’ with extraordinary endemic wildlife, or reach out to wider UK and US markets with new tourism products.

In 2003, its president surprised the world by announcing his intention to triple the area of Madagascar’s protected reserves, making them account for ten per cent of the entire country. Conservational International, with whom I am currently with in Madagascar, along with a party of UK and US tour operators, has been asked to support the government and tourist board in their current conservation and tourism planning.

There has been extensive consultation with local communities adjacent to these parks, and one of the hopes is that income from tourism will improve their lives and create sufficient income for them to desist from cutting down their remarkable forests and illegally hunting. 

I feel that the big trend in UK and US tourism is for real, authentic experiences rather than those created specifically for tourism. As travellers we want to participate in both the cultural and natural heritage of each place we visit; for example, no safari to Kenya is now complete without a community experience. In Madagascar this means learning how to spin silk, catching fish or sitting with a village elder learning about their fady (taboos), as well as finding and identifying wildlife.

We also increasingly want to feel that our holiday is a responsible one, one that helps support local communities and conservation. In 2001, I wrote in this very opinion column that culture was the sleeping giant of African tourism, and that the industry’s failure to identify and market it up until that point could partly explain why tourism there had grown so much more slowly than that in Asia. After my time here, I believe that there is nowhere that this is still more true than in Madagascar.

There are many great wildlife destinations around the world, and competition is tough. To reach out to new markets beyond France, and to generate sufficient tourist income for communities, thus enabling the president’s conservation and development dream to become a reality, Madagascar must widen its appeal by embracing responsible tourism that brings together both its cultural and natural heritage. When it does this it will join the A league of African tourism destinations.