Peru offers very attractive places for tourism. It receives thousands of visitors every year attracted by the local natural landscapes and cultural resources. These areas are inhabited by indigenous communities who live in poverty with low levels of human development.

Tourists that visit these areas feel attracted to other cultures and want to do a different type of tourism, filled with experiences where they can learn from the indigenous communities. However, they cannot access this kind of activities due to lack of basic services and poor managerial skills among local communities.

At CODESPA we work to obtain that local indigenous communities achieve extra income from their own community-managed rural tourism activities. The three key components of this project are:

• Reaching community-managed tourism quality levels in line with market requirements.
• Self-managed marketing by the communities, with participation and advice from the private tourism sector.
• Public-private alliances to increase the community tourism businesses of the beneficiary population.

Up to now, over 3,000 people have already benefitted from this initiative. This is carried out with the collaboration of the CAF Development Bank of Latin America, within the framework of the RUTAS programme: Community-managed tourism destinations with Sustainable Quality in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador.

An increasing number of public and private alliances are forming part of this initiative, such as the country’s Ministry of Tourism, CTB, INECO, BANESTO, ROVIRALTA FOUNDATION, and a whole array of public and private institutions from the region.

This allows indigenous communities that traditionally depend on agriculture to receive supplementary income thanks to community-managed tourism, gradually coming out of the poverty.