Picture yourself at sunrise spotting dolphins in the crystalline waters of the Banda Sea. Or snorkelling in one of 50 world class dive sites off of south-eastern Sulawesi. Your guides are members of Indonesia’s Bajo Mola community, a traditional nomadic seafaring group, who have warmly welcomed you into their floating homes, fed you traditional delicacies, and accompanied you to a pier to admire the constellations in the southern night sky.
The Bajo are based on four islands in Wakatobi, a national marine park straddling the Banda and Flores seas. Wakatobi lies in the heart of the Coral Triangle, a global centre of marine biodiversity boasting more than 900 fish species, 750 coral reef species and the world’s second largest barrier reef. The richness of Wakatobi’s flora and fauna have earned it a designation as a World Heritage Site and comparisons to the Amazon basin, underscoring its potential as an eco-tourism destination.
Like many emerging travel destinations in Indonesia, Wakatobi is remote and the local community have had very limited experience in managing tourism. In other areas, this has been a recipe for unsustainable development that has disproportionately benefited the few over the many.
Seeking to foster a better outcome in Wakatobi, the British Council and Indonesia’s Bank Mandiri invited the Bajo Mola community to join a programme that is developing eco-tourism social enterprises in Indonesia. The Mandiri Bersama Mandiri (“self-reliant together with Mandiri”) programme aims to help rural communities develop their tourist potential sustainably and preserve their local culture and pristine environment.
Through this programme, the British Council, Bank Mandiri and the Wakatobi District Government worked with five villages, where many Bajo have now settled, to create a tourism board and develop infrastructure, activities and amenities. They focused on helping the community to enhance their tourism management skills, work collectively, and develop an offer that blends eco-tourism with authentic Bajo cultural activities. They also supported the villages to form a social enterprise that would manage the tourism business, reinvest part of its surplus for the benefit of the community and distribute the rest fairly among its members.
“Our aim is to build sustainable and self-reliant tourism, ensuring that the Bajo community are the principle actors in managing their assets and that they engage directly with tourists without intermediaries, providing tour guides, accommodation and other amenities,” said Ari Sutanti, the British Council’s senior programmes manager in Indonesia.
The community does not seek to develop as a mass market destination, which would stretch the area’s carrying capacity and threaten its biodiversity. Instead, it seeks to benefit from the growing snorkelling and scuba diving market and ensure that a greater proportion of revenue accrues to the Bajo people. “We chose to support community-based, value-added activities that visitors can enjoy when they are not diving,” said Ari Sutanti.
And so, after 18 months in the programme, the Mola tourism board had developed a “package” and in September they welcomed a contingent of guests from the capital, Jakarta.
Among other activities, the visitors boarded a bodi, a traditional Bajo Mola boat, to observe dolphins swimming at daybreak when they are especially active. They also paddled in lepa canoes along canals and coastline to discover the maritime lifestyle of the Bajo and learn about their fishing techniques.
A cultural walking tour brought the visitors through the narrow lanes and into the stilt houses of a Bajo settlement and showcased traditional arts and crafts and healing practices. The villagers fed their guests authentic Bajo dishes and at night invited them to gaze at the star filled skies while explaining the astral navigation system they used to cross vast oceans long before compasses, radars and GPS.
It sounds like a dream, but at a time when forest fires are burning across Indonesia, underscoring the threat that rapacious business practices pose for that archipelago’s plants, animals and citizens, the Bajo Mola community represents a small but sustainable alternative, an example of a sustainable community social enterprise designed to benefit people and planet.
Content on this page is paid for and provided by the British Council, sponsor of the international social enterprise hub
