The Elephant Home and Kikorongo community

As you plan to stay or have already stayed at the elephant home in Kikorongo community, next to Queen Elizabeth National park, it is important to know how this community lodge relates to the local community and what your stay means to the local community and the environment in and around Queen Elizabeth national park.

The elephant home is an accommodation facility owned and run by the local community. It was started in 2016 to empower the local people through involving them in tourism to drive direct benefits from local natural and cultural tourism resources. until now, the elephant home is the main sponsor supporting tourism tourism product development, innovation, conservation and community empowerment initiatives of the people in Kikorongo community. No wonder, the elephant home is refereed to as the only tourist lodge that knows the local peoples needs, by the local people.

The elephant home implements all community development and conservation initiatives through an established community development committee made of of local development and government institutions. Thus all the community activities supported by the elephant home are fully owned and managed by the locals themselves.

Back ground of Kikorongo community

In the past years, Kikorongo community was never involved in tourism activities. Tourism businesses in and around this village were all owned and run by non residents of this community. The locals instead exclusively kept gathering, farming and doing other petty businesses to survive on firewood collection and sale, charcoal burning, hunting for bush meat, and other subsistence activities.

The lodge was started as a pilot for sustainable livelihoods through tourism.  This was started by  few community members after they had a chance to visit Ruboni community camp and appreciated how it is empowering the local communities in the Rwenzori foothills at the base camp of Mihunga gate.

Over the years, the community has established over ten community tourism activities that also link Kikorongo to other surrounding villages, trained the women and youth, created employment to the locals and established sustainable livelihood activities in Kikorongo village.

The elephant home enriches Queen Elizabeth visitor experience?

The elephant home enables the visitors to stay in this community, meet the people, and learn the local way of life. This way visitors can learn the other side of the the most enjoyed wildlife safari in queen Elizabeth National Park, demonstrating how the local people relate with wildlife. On the other hand, linking the local people to tourism in this way creates many livelihoods opportunities to them.

In this regard, the elephant home enables the local community earns income from tourism when they sell their local goods and services to the tourists. This gives the community tangible benefits of conserving the park which is otherwise impossible without direct sales and income to the grass root residents.

What does the Elephant home do for Kikorongo community?

The Elephant home has opened Kikorongo village to community tourism. The lodge provides financial and non financial support to facilitate, training, investment, and mentorship roles to ensure that the local communities can use tourism as a vehicle for sustainable livelihood that make them resilient to the impacts of climate change, or reduce poaching and gathering for daily survival. The lodge puts the community first, by directly supporting initiatives that improve the local way of life. These are the specific activities the elephant home is doing for the local community promote tourism and sustainable livelihoods in Kikorongo community;

Training and skills.

The elephant home supports training the locals in different skills especially those related to production, tourism and sustainable natural resource use. We have trained the youth and women on making charcoal briquettes, handmade paper, making organic manure, on waste recycling, handicrafts development and tourism service delivery.  

Providing a market for local goods and services.

The elephant home is a selling center for local goods and services to the tourists. The revenue generated from these sales directly goes to the local people who produce them. The lodge has a gift shop, sales village tours and experience all owned and run by the local community, providing a sustainable source of revenue to the local people.

Creation of tourism enterprises for the community as alternative income streams.

The elephant home has created several tours, such as the Kikorongo bodaboda safari, Kikorongo village tour, the Kahokya hill trek to the mountain side, the coffee/ vanilla and cocoa growing experience, the cotton growing tour and others. These enable the local to generate income from the tourists hence diverting their livelihoods from extracting natural resources and poaching from the park.

Provision or linking of relief and aid to the community during the time of crisis.

During times of need and crisis, the elephant home has provided. During hard times like covid19, poor harvest leading to famine and other emergencies, the elephant home both mobilizes and provides external support to the community.

Adult literacy and education support to the local residents.

The Elephant home is conducting literacy classes for the women, men and local school going children. This is aimed to increase the local rate of English language communication in the three levels of writing, reading and speaking. Over 70 people are currently benefiting and the impact is immense.

Promoting environment conservation and sustainable production.

The entire community benefits from the conservation awareness, classes and programs of tree planting, proper waste management, organic gardening and energy briquette making.

Creation of Employment.

The elephant home employs only local people in categories of direct or indirect employment on full-time and part time basis. If there is need of external technical skills, the lodge contracts experts to train the local staff and they are allowed to take over. besides, all the other programs supported by the elephant home are aimed on increasing innovation, productivity and generation of more local jobs for the locals themselves.

How does the elephant home raise the support to Kikorongo community?

• Part of the revenue generated from accommodation – A fraction of the revenue, after meeting the business costs, is used to support the community development initiatives.
• Community volunteer initiatives – The elephant home organize local community volunteers during community development projects. wherever there is need of external expertise, the community creates foreign volunteer placements targeting travelers, researchers or students on internship
• Writing small proposals for support from charitable organizations – The lodge staff or volunteers, working with the community development committee, help to write small project proposals or make crowd funding initiatives focusing on specific needs at different times.
• Contribution from well wishers: The elephant home does receive gifts and donations from well-wishers to support on certain needs in the community. these are mainly guests of the elephant home or their references.

Any of the above avenues of supporting the elephant home and Kikorongo community are open to anybody who may want to put a smile on someones face in Kikorongo community. you can contact the Elephant home by whats-app on this website to explore more options about this call.

Challenges met by the Elephant home when supporting the local community

• Low revenue generated by the elephant home lodge mainly caused by the following specific problems;
  • Problem: Low accommodation capacity: with only few accommodation rooms, we loose the opportunity of accommodating more people and generating more revenue foe community development. In most casese, we return guests when we cant accommodate them, especially during peak seasons.
  • Attempted Solution: the elephant home is prioritizing the construction of more six rooms to increase the accommodation capacity by 200%. This will enable the lodge to accommodate 20 people a night. The guest room accommodation project is estimated to cost 25000, and currently remaining with 15000 US$ to be completed.
  • Problem: Poor/ insufficient marketing: the village lacks expertise to conduct sufficient marketing for the tourism products. Besides, the little marketing effort that would have hopefully rippled is negatively affected by a very low accommodation capacity.
  • Proposed solution: So far, the elephant lodge markets through website and a few social medial handles, provision of quality service that hopefully earns them a word of mount marketing. The elephant home is prioritizing looking for an expert support to develop and implement a proper marketing strategy.
• Excessive illiteracy among the community
  • Problem: Most people in kikorongo cant read and write. This makes communication to the tourists and other visitors hard. It complicates the involvement of the locals in tourism. The village has only one public primary school, no secondary school or college. The children in this village get very limited education due to the low development of the education infrastructure and facilities.
  • Attempted solution: The elephant home is running a literacy education program to increase the number of people who can read, write and communicate with English. This covers the adults and small school going children.
• Lack of water in the community
  • Problem: Kikorongo community has no local water source other than the rain that comes once in three months. Besides, the rainwater harvesting infrastructure is not built for the community members. Kikorongo is located close to the equator and receives on of the hottest and longest droughts in Kasese district. This poses a high need for water by the residents. The only water used in Kikorongo community is transported from 13km away making it very expensive at 1000 Uganda Shillings for every 20 liters. This is the highest price of water in Uganda. People spend a lot of resources on water. Resources being time and money. This being a pressing need, it is almost impossible engaging the community in any other livelihoods outside this life struggle.
  • Proposed solution: Provision of water can be challenging. However, we have identified three options that we are looking at to address this problem;
    • 1). Drilling and solar pumping water within the community,
  • • 2). Rainwater harvesting on household level,
    • 3). Constructing a gravity water scheme from the local Mountains. 
• The village has identified a potential water source on the mountains and the technical  Bills of Quantities for the project has been developed.

Cuurrently, all development resources and support are directed to support the above solutions that we believe will help empower the local residents of Kikorongo community

Here is an opportunity to participate in these projects and change someone’s life

If you can imagine what you would go through in one day without water in your home, then you can understand what the people in Kikorongo go through all their life. The needs of Kikorongo community form a perfect opportunity for anyone or any charitable organization to do something that touches someone’s life and ripples to the entire community.

We continue to request for any support from well-wishers and charitable organization that can stretch their hand to help the elephant home empower the local people in this village while creating a secure space for the future generations and the local wildlife in and outside Queen Elizabeth National park.

The support can be one-time or long term on contract basis. This support can be in all ranges from volunteering for a day to providing materials and equipment, skills and or financial contribution to any of the projects.