Setup
Community conservancies in East Africa do conservation-critical work, then compete for visibility against international booking platforms that take big cuts and couldn’t care less about sustainability. The SMART fellowship — a Cornell program run with USIU-Africa’s Chandaria Business School, the Northern Rangelands Trust, and Ecotourism Kenya — puts student teams on exactly this problem.
What we built
I led our team’s Community Tourism Relay, built for Il Ngwesi, a Maasai-owned conservancy in Laikipia County, Kenya. Three pieces:
- Bookings. Lodge stays, homestays, guided wildlife walks, cultural experiences — booked directly. A community Tourism Steward confirms each one over SMS, and payment runs through M-Pesa, card, or PayPal.
- The Maasai Marketplace. An online shop for handmade goods from the community — jewelry, bags, clothing, decor, art — with cart, checkout, and delivery within Kenya.
- The Community Portal. A revenue dashboard for bookings and income, plus a merchant portal where community members manage their own listings.
We kept it deliberately low-tech, because the whole point is that the community runs it themselves — and that revenue stays with the people protecting the conservancy’s 15,000 hectares instead of leaking to a middleman.
At the program hackathon, it was judged the top solution among the 5 multi-institutional teams.
Why I care
Fee structures, discoverability, and certification rules quietly decide how much of each booking stays with the community doing the conserving. This project let me work on those decisions directly instead of writing about them.