Joao Fogaça, member of the UNWTO volunteers corps, has travelled to Mozambique on 28 June to participate in the “Community Based Lodges Training Programme, Mozambique” project for a period of 6 months.

The project aims to consolidate the capacity of human resources in the project area so that local communities can autonomously run the lodges (Madjadjane Lodge; Tinti Gala Lodge; Covane Lodge) and other tourism businesses; and to consolidate the access to the market and the operational capacity of the lodges in relation to market demand.

The integration of the volunteers to the project involves tasks such as: product development, planning and development of promotional activities and website, exploring further marketing possibilities, investigating the availability of marketing training manuals and documents on the internet and sharing them with the project’s stakeholders, providing support in other tasks in accordance with the needs of the project in relation to the marketing component or in relation to other project components such as the development of a community handicraft shop or the identification of potential business linkages to be created within the tourism supply chain.

This initiative is the result of an agreement between the UNWTO.Themis Foundation, through its Volunteers’ Programme, and UNWTO’s Technical Cooperation Programme, that consists in integrating UNWTO Volunteers into the implementation of ST-EP projects in order to provide specific tourism development abilities and positively enrich the volunteers’ perception of the local and social reality.