We recently completed Tourism CoLab’s Regenerative Development and Tourism Primer—a course that blends systems thinking with practical tourism applications. This marks our first step towards regenerative hosting. We are not yet practising regenerative tourism; instead, we are currently focused on building reliable hosting and management services. Our goal is to start our regenerative journey, and we are actively looking for partners to collaborate with us.
Foundations from the Primer: Regenerating the Five Capitals
The course taught us that regeneration is about nurturing relationships within living systems, not just applying quick fixes. It emphasises stewardship across five interconnected areas:
Community Capital:
We aim to move beyond transactional guest stays and create experiences that strengthen neighbourhood bonds. This includes community hosting, farm stays, guided tours, and arts and crafts studios—activities that invite guests to connect with the community and add value locally. Our approach is different from extractive platforms; we want to maximise value within the community and the host country.
Economic Capital:
We believe value should go beyond money to include health, wellbeing, trust, and reciprocity. We want to co-create value with visitors, locals, and businesses. In East Africa’s fast-moving rental market, we are committed to fair value sharing. We will not ask local suppliers—who are often already fragile—to offer unsustainable discounts. Their resilience is vital to the wellbeing of the whole community.
Place Capital:
We celebrate what makes each place unique, including its culture and traditions. We focus on conserving resources like water and recycling waste in our properties. Instead of “bioregional flows” and “resource circularity,” we simply aim to use resources wisely and ensure nothing is wasted. We also share local stories and learn from indigenous knowledge to enrich our guests’ experience.
Nature Capital:
We are committed to protecting and improving the environment—climate, soil, biodiversity, and ecosystem services—especially in rural areas. We want to share information with guests about how their stay supports nature and use early warning systems to monitor our impact, so we can pause or change course if our activities threaten the health of the community or environment.
Systems Capital:
We recognise that everything is connected. We support both the physical infrastructure (like buildings) and the networks that help communities recover and thrive. We aim to understand how value and resources move through the community, much like mapping a business’s value chain, and recognise that these flows affect more than just tourism.
These insights align with the Presencing Institute’s “Leading from the Emerging Future” framework, which encourages us to pause, sense deeper currents, let go of old assumptions, and prototype new possibilities.
Diagnostic Tools: From Inquiry to Vigilance
The Primer gave us practical tools:
- The “WHY” x5 Technique: Asking “why” five times will help us get to the root of decisions, such as pricing models, guest impacts, and ecological costs.
- Strategic Retreat and Embracing Decay: We recognise that endless growth is unrealistic. Sometimes, it’s necessary to pause in underperforming or environmentally strained contexts, accepting natural decline as a step towards renewal.
- Greenwashing Detection: We are committed to real change, not just surface-level improvements. Warning signs include lack of evidence for transformation, community engagement without real power sharing, commodifying nature, and focusing only on revenue.
- Exploring Blockchain and Non-Fiat Economies: We are interested in using technologies like blockchain for contract validation, guest and owner verification, traceability, and community tokenisation. This could help us represent the health of our communities more transparently and enhance our stewardship.
Conclusion
Alkebulan Homes and Villas is at the beginning of its regenerative journey. We are testing our hosting services and actively seeking partners, homeowners, and guests who share our vision for hospitality that benefits communities and the environment. Our commitment is to learn, collaborate, and grow together—measuring success not just by revenue, but by the positive impact we create. If you are interested in joining us or learning more, we invite you to connect and help shape a new future for tourism in Africa.
Finally, we would like to thank Diane Dredge and Nadine Schmidt, facilitators of the Tourism Co-Lab Regenerative Tourism Primer, for providing many of the ideas discussed here. We are also grateful to the entire Co-Lab community for the inspiring conversations, thoughts, and ideas shared online during the three sessions.