Safari Tours with a Difference Making a Difference
SO.. much more than the usual wildlife safari, UP! also gives you a unique and transformational opportunity to meet enterprising Ugandans who are solving poverty and hunger.
About us
We are Different
Uganda Partnership -UP! hosts intimate and personal small group tours. Let us introduce you to heartstopping animals and landscapes, but it will be our time in the villages and community projects which will leave you breathless.
How we work
Across Uganda, there are inspirational stories of enterprise and endeavour of Africans working together for a better future. It is this story that our tours tell. On each 14-18 day tour, we get alongside and partner three or four local organisations who are using business enterprise to improve their lives. Yes we will certainly visit wonderful national parks and enjoy the spectacle of natural Uganda, but more so, we are here to learn from and generate additional support for the local community organisations and people we meet.
There is no limit to the innovation and enterprise of Uganda's rural people. After only two years of visits, we have established partnerships with 4 community organisations. These focus on youth business training, establishing farm trading cooperatives, setting up group harvest storage programmes and schemes to help rural women share knowledge.
For example, Grains for Wealth (G4W) in a Registered CBO based in Paya District near Tororo. For two years UP! visitors have met and developed understanding and relationships with the G4W family groups who are all subsistence farmers.
Our research with the community discovered that storing harvest in traditional bags and granaries leads to a loss of between 30 and 50% of their crop, to moulds, weevils and vermin. UP! extensively trialled alternative harvest storage systems and then created a loan fund to invest in a community food bank using PICS hermetically sealed bags.
Three harvest seasons on and the group now loses almost no harvest at all with a significant increase in family food security and income for school fees and medicines etc. The initial UP! investment has now been repaid and will be reinvested in growing the scheme to benefit other G4W group families.