Helping Gorillas Help Us

If it were not for an innovative approach to tourism, life would have been very different for the 55-year-old Console Nyirabatangana. 

A decade ago, Nyirabatangana was living below the poverty line of $2 a day. She could barely afford one meal a day for her family. 

"We went hungry for days and woke up every morning wishing we could get just a meal a day," she says. "It was a difficult time for us."

The mother of five, whose husband died in 1995, has been able to feed and educate her children using the money extended to members of her community through one of the projects funded by gorilla tourism in Rwanda. 

Her eldest child, Christine Ndacyayisaba, 22, completed school and a diploma in education, and is a teacher in Gasizi, a village in Musanze, near the national park.

Rwanda is well known for mountain gorillas – an endangered species found only in the border areas between Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – and hosted more than a million visitors between 2006-13, generating from the national parks alone $75m (£44m) in tourism revenue in that time; 85% of this is from trekkers who come to see some of the country's 500 gorillas.

In 2005, the Rwandan government initiated a tourism revenue-sharing scheme, whereby 5% of annual income from national parks is disbursed to communities. 

As a result, $1.83m has been distributed over the past nine years to fund 360 community projects across the country, ranging from roads, bridges, bee-keeping, water and sanitation, small and medium enterprises, and handicrafts. The Rwanda Development Board (RDB) estimates that 39,000 people have benefitted from this tourism.

The home of the Rwandan gorillas is the Volcanoes national park in Kinigi, close to the border with DRC, where communities are allocated 40% of the scheme; communities around Nyungwe forest in the south-west and Akagera national park in the east each receive 30%.