Ecotourism for Community Empowerment and Social Inclusion: The Case of Abindu Sacred site in Kisumu County, Kenya

Ecotourism, which is currently the fastest growing form of global tourism in the world, is more prevalent today than ever before. Communities that once had very little industry and misguided management systems have now been able to flourish with the employment of local people. By involving the local people in these programs and when a direct stimulus is returned to the community, rather than having the profits sent elsewhere, programs have been proven to be much more successful. When discussing ecotourism, it is also important to realize that these programs are not always beneficial to the local communities and many ecotourism ventures are controlled by outside operators. A useful way to discern responsible community-based ecotourism is to approach it from a development perspective, which considers social, environmental and economic goals, and questions how ecotourism can meet the needs of the host community in terms of improved living standards both in the short and long term. This perspective differs somewhat from those approaching ecotourism predominantly from an environmental perspective.The achievement of sustainable tourism development through community based ecotourism initiatives, require the building of community capacities to understand the importance of the resources they own. Most communities are unaware of the potential their cultural and natural natural resources offer. This study will focus on the potential of an ecotourism site, namely, Abindu in Nyahera, in Kisumu County, where there is possibility of organizing the community to run ecotourism ventures.The general objective of the study was to ascertain livelihood enhancement opportunities brought in the wake of ecotourism development in host communities, whilst the specific objectives are to: assess the likely identify key stakeholders in the ecotourism site; assess the level of female empowerment in the development of ecotourism in the community; examine the impacts of ecotourism ventures in the community. The Study examined this community in terms of an empowerment framework as a suitable mechanism for aiding analysis of the social, economic, psychological and political impacts of ecotourism on local communities.The study used qualitative methods to collect the data, namely,participant observation, key informant Interviews, and focused group discussions. Keywords: Ecotourism, Community based Ecotourism, Empowerment, Abindu, Kisumu

Food systems sustainability : an examination of different viewpoints on food system change

Global food insecurity levels remain stubbornly high. One of the surest ways to grasp the scale and consequence of global inequality is through a food systems lens. In a predominantly urban world, urban food systems present a useful lens to engage a wide variety of urban (and global) challenges—so called ‘wicked problems.’ This paper describes a collaborative research project between four urban food system research units, two European and two African. The project purpose was to seek out solutions to what lay between, across and within the different approaches applied in the understanding of each city’s food system challenges. Contextual differences and immediate (perceived) needs resulted in very different views on the nature of the challenge and the solutions required. Value positions of individuals and their disciplinary “enclaves” presented further boundaries. The paper argues that finding consensus provides false solutions. Rather the identification of novel approaches to such wicked problems is contingent of these differences being brought to the fore, being part of the conversation, as devices through which common positions can be discovered, where spaces are created for the realisation of new perspectives, but also, where difference is celebrated as opposed to censored

Co-production of urban knowledge: Context approach for effective and efficient governance of cities

Effective and efficient governance is driven by policies that prevail in urban contexts. Policies are usually the result of knowledge co-production, but the efficacy of the process of translating knowledge into policy is still not well defined in the Kenyan context. One example of this is the city of Kisumu, which has been the focus of knowledge co-production by researchers from Kisumu and Gothenburg, and when there is active involvement of academics, policymakers and the private sector. The creation of networks and platforms has been instrumental in knowledge production and has allowed for multi-level co-production facilitating the governance of the city at different spatial and administrative levels. Understanding of the different contexts that have been key in the knowledge production, in turn, is important for the process of determining how these have been the drivers of urban knowledge for governance in Kisumu