About Responsible Tourism
In partnership with the Sustainable Tourism Partnership Programme (STPP), the programme aims to assist Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) with environmental, cultural, heritage and social criteria, economic best practices, community resilience, universal accessibility and service excellence.
The STPP’s approach is to drive mass scale change across the industry by working with local, regional, provincial and national public and private stakeholders to form strong collaborative partnerships. The STPP’s programmes are aimed at delivering mind-set changes, training, education, up-skilling, market data and specialised projects and programmes that provide solutions that assist the smaller tourism sector to overcome barriers to sustainable growth and development.
About the Africa Coastal Odyssey
The purpose of the Africa Coastal Odyssey expedition is to follow the Walk4Africa walkathon routes while uncovering stories on the topics of responsible tourism and environmental impact while walking the coastlines of Africa.
Kicking off mid-March 2022, the Odyssey will walk the Western/Northern Cape coastline of South Africa from the Cape Agulhas Lighthouse to the Namibia border, a distance of 1,142 km (710 miles).
In mid-May 2022, the Odyssey will continue along the 1,570 km (976 mi) Namibia coastline to reach the Angola border by the first week of September. For more info, click on the buttons below.
And so the Odyssey will continue along the Angola coastline in 2023, covering all 40 countries over a period of nine years to end back at the southern tip of Africa in 2030.
SOUTH AFRICA ODDYSSEY NAMIBIA ODDYSSEYAbout the Odyssey Journalism
Journalism, film and visual communications students enrolled at partner universities and education institutions in each of the 40 host countries will be fully hosted to gain practical storytelling/reporting skills and experience.
While walking the coastline, they will interview rural communities, conservation NGOs, and marine-related academics to report on these environmental stories.
Typical story angles will include:
- Examining the complex relationships that coastal communities have with nature
- Impacts of climate change, environmental degradation, plastic pollution, and marine resource extraction on local communities
- Ecosystem restoration projects and their current impact
- Local heroes and how they are helping to protect the natural world.