Community tours in Rwanda provide experiences of rural Rwandan life with traditional accommodation facilities through homestays, interesting cultural activities, ecotourism and traditional gastronomy. With these tours, visitors can directly engage with local community members around the national parks as a way of engaging and being part of the country’s tourism sector.
Get a chance to watch locals showcasing and sharing their beautiful culture with visitors, in so doing allowing them to directly benefit from tourism.
By promoting community-based tourism, the revenues directly target local residents rather than the government. During these tours, travellers are hosted and accommodated by locals in traditional homestays with basic services, such as toilets, running water, meals and rustic but comfortable rooms. These are in areas that are not doing so well economically.
Most people that live around Rwanda’s national parks are farmers while others cannot afford even to buy land hence when they become direct beneficiaries of tourism, their livelihoods are guaranteed of being enhanced. When you visit these areas after some years, you will notice some infrastructural development like establishment of clean water sources, health centers and good quality community-based accommodation services that will in the end boost Rwanda’s tourism sector.
The most popular and interesting community tours in Rwanda include:
Gorilla Guardian Village (former Iby’Iwacu Cultural Village) is the most popular community tour initiative and is close to Volcanoes National Park. Visitors are offered visits to the King’s Place, banana beer brewing, traditional dances and preparation as well as tasting of local cuisines.
Cultural tours to Kagano Living Village take visitors through the stunning Kagano Village to have an insight of Rwandan rural life through farm tours, visitors to homesteads and businesses lasting for 2-3 hours.
Community Tours with Ubumwe Community Visit provides accommodation, educational visits and vocational training and workshop skills. This community is one of the places in Rwanda where education is considered an option or luxury and during your visit, you can gift, donate and even teach locals some hands-on skills.
The Humure Refugee Village also offers community tours, about one hour drive from Akagera National Park and offers local cooperative visits to reach visitors dancing and cooking skills. You will see the craft house beautifully decorated with cow dung, tour cattle farms to lend a hand in milking and other milk rituals.
The outstanding Nyange Community tours bring a unique perspective into typical Rwandan life with activities such as banana beer brewing, visits to the local iron smith, make stops at the tree nursery beds, learn how to prepare Rwandan foods and even taste them, get taught how to weave mats and carpentry works among others.