Welcome to CENFACS’ Online Diary!
22 August 2018
Post No. 53
The Week’s Contents
• TRENDING in Poverty Relief: Tourism like a means of reducing rural poverty
• Virtual RUN to reduce poverty
• Summer Volunteering TRIPS to the need
… And much more!
Key Messages from the Week’s Contents
Tourism like a means of reducing rural poverty
The last piece in a series of our Summer 2018 Trending in following the direction of poverty reduction is to look at how tourism helps tourists or visitors to connect with rural lives and livelihoods.
Rural areas in Africa are where the majority of poor people live in Africa compared to the urban areas. Tourism in rural areas is a good example of including rural poverty into holidays making or experience for those looking forward to these kinds of tourist expeditions.
For more on tourism like rural poverty reliever, please read under the Main Development section of this post.
Virtual RUN to reduce poverty
This year, we are introducing virtual Run to broaden the scope of our physical activity project of running to reduce poverty. This new injection is about bringing into our project the running activities carried out in the virtual world or digital and computer worlds or other worlds; activities that may contribute to our efforts in helping to reduce poverty.
Our focus on physical aspect of the Run project still remains the same including its key spirit, which is of undertaking a basic physical activity of running to help reduce poverty. However, in real world there are people who would like to do things physically, but for various reasons they may not be able to do so. Because of that, there is an alternative to do it virtually with CENFACS.
For further details and to inform us about virtual Run, refer to the notes under the Main Development section of this post.
Summer TRIPS to volunteer for needy people and communities
These are the kinds of experiences we expect people to do over the Summer period especially for those who want to spend their Summer time differently, particularly but not exclusively by doing something about poverty. We recommend this type of experiences under our volunteering scheme known as All in Development Volunteers Scheme (AiDVS).
Under CENFACS’ AiDV Scheme, one can take seasonal opportunities like of Summer to volunteer or do some internship on poverty relief and sustainable development. Where the person decides to go far away to visit needy communities or volunteer to our Africa-based projects, CENFACS would facilitate and liaise with its Africa-based Sister Organisations where the projects are based to smooth the volunteering process or visits to the projects under mutually agreed arrangements and conditions.
For details about AiDVS, contact CENFACS. If you have visited or volunteered for projects recently and would like to share with us your experience, please contact us as well.
Main Developments from the Week’s Contents
• Virtual Run to reduce poverty
CENFACS’ Run to Reduce Poverty is a physical activity project that aims at improving physical activity and mental health and well-being of the participants while helping to reduce poverty. However, for various reasons they are people who would like to support the relief efforts about poverty through run, but they may not be able to do it if the only way of doing it is through physical activity. These people who may be experiencing handicap to do physical activity of running to help reduce poverty could include the following:
~ People/parents caring for very young children
~ Pregnant women
~ Elderly people
~ Disable people
~ Those who are not physically fit or mobile to run
~ Those who do not have opportunity to physically run
~ Under certain conditions and circumstances, we can also consider those who use outdoor and indoor fitness equipment to virtually run.
For these deprived-to-physically-run people, they can virtually run to help reduce poverty with CENFACS. If you are organising this kind of virtual activity or event, let us know. It is also better to advise us that the people participating in the virtual run are the physically deprived ones we listed above or they have a serious handicap prohibiting them to undertake any physical engagement.
• Tourism like a means of reducing rural poverty
It is well known and documented that poverty is more widespread in rural areas than in urban ones of Africa. Most poor people live in rural areas there. And if you are tourist and would like to associate your travel with a poverty story or a touch of poverty, then surely where most of the poor people live are the places to visit. These places can be the rural areas and the peripheral areas of the urban centre.
Generally speaking, tourism and tourists need food and agricultural products like any humans to live and enjoy their holidays. Rural areas are as well the places where come food and agricultural products. By buying and consuming food and agricultural products, tourists connect and generate demand for agricultural products. In this respect, tourists to the rural areas can help reduce rural poverty and boost rural income even the economy. Tourism in rural areas is as well a learning curve or experience of new cultures, foods, environments, ways of life and products.
Finally, whether you are following the direction of poverty reduction as tourists or virtually running to reduce poverty or even volunteering to the local needs; please do not forget to record your data or simply what you are doing. Please keep images, videos, films, photos and voices of what you think is relevant to share as stories with us and others when you return.
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Thank you for visiting CENFACS website and reading this post.
Thank you as well to those who made or make comments about our weekly posts.
We look forward to receiving your regular visits and continuing support throughout 2018.
With many thanks
