Online travel company, Responsible Travel, has today announced a new collection of holidays on its site, all run by small local tour operators owned by women.
From trekking trips in the Indian Himalayas to cultural tours in Ghana, each of the holidays included in this collection is a celebration of female entrepreneurship against the odds, with stories to inspire ahead of International Women’s Day on 8th March 2017.
In the newly released travel guide that accompanies the collection Responsible Travel summarises some of the challenges faced by female entrepreneurs in developing countries: “In struggling nations, it is invariably the women who struggle most, as any semblance of equality falls away. Women and girls are disadvantaged from the outset by a lack of access to education, scant maternity benefits, cultural expectations about the woman’s role in the home, and inherent gender bias in the workplace.”
One of the women interviewed by Responsible Travel in the guide is Samrawit Moges, the founder and Managing Director of Travel Ethiopia, the first tour operator in Ethiopia to employ permanent female guides. She says “If you educate a woman, if a woman is empowered economically, it’s not only for her – it goes for her children, her siblings. She will want the children to go to school for higher education, rather than getting married at an earlier stage. So it is changing the society.”
Justin Francis, CEO of Responsible Travel comments on the new collection; “Tourism has the potential to be a superpower for women in developing countries, but while the majority of its workforce is female, these women are concentrated in lower-level jobs. With such a broad geographical reach, and a huge range of skills required, tourism has the opportunity to pull women out of poverty, equip them with skills and provide dignified, sustainable employment.
We hope this new collection of holidays, and the stories of how the women behind them have overcome prejudice and obstacles to successfully run their own businesses, will serve to inspire generations of girls around the world.”
This is a press release published by Responsible Travel. View their female holiday collection here.
