Noel de Villiers

With the conviction that Africa’s greatest assets are its people, its cultural heritage, and its natural resources, Noel de Villiers is creating a continent-wide network of community- owned and operated tourism routes that leverage these resources to create economic and social development opportunities for African rural areas, towns, and cities.

Through his organization, Open Africa, Noel is building a pan-African network of urban and rural tourism routes that are locally owned and managed, but marketed internationally. The vision behind this network is to create economic and social opportunities by harnessing the growing potential of tourism in Africa for marginalized communities. He is putting control of this potential into the hands of local communities by working with them to identify, promote, and manage their own cultural and natural assets. These efforts create new businesses, preserve cultural heritage, and foster community pride of civic cooperation and leadership in a new generation.
Noel’s model encourages marginalized local communities to form their own businesses to serve the tourism market, thereby affording them entry to a previously unreachable economic system. Through creative online marketing and industry partnerships, these enterprises are brought to a new level of quality, marketability and potential. The shared effort of developing and sustaining not just individual enterprises but linked tourist routes leads to infrastructure development, increased political participation, and links to the international community. Open Africa also creates a platform for community leaders to champion a new path of growth and development for their communities.

Over 60 percent of South Africans live in rural areas which are still riddled with poverty and underdevelopment. While there has been legislation enacted since 1994 to support and operationalize rural development, the lack of local capacity and other barriers have hindered substantive progress in this regard. The result has been continuing substandard health care delivery, education, and other basic services. Most rural economies are small and stagnant, lacking connections to broader markets and perpetuating apathy about growth and expansion. There is little to no support for entrepreneurship or collective enterprise in this country and even less in most other parts of Africa. The World Tourism Organization estimates that Africa represents only 4.3 percent of the world tourism market. Even at this small percentage, tourism is still accountable for 16.5 million jobs on the continent and is one of the few markets where indigenous skills fill an important niche. There remains a tremendous opportunity for growth in this sector, which in recent times has been showing good promise in many parts of the continent. The most common strategy to develop tourism is to cater to the high-cost luxury market. However, these enterprises are overwhelmingly dominated by international firms. In the end much of the revenue from building, owning and operating five star resorts and hotels leaves the countries where they are hosted. The employment generated by the luxury market tends to be centralized at the main tourism destinations and does not spread the foreign wealth among wider regions. There is little opportunity, therefore, for communities off the beaten path to capitalize on their rich cultures, histories, and local treasures. The general economic stagnancy described earlier means that even community leaders are not thinking of organizing themselves to leverage economic opportunities that may exist.

Noel founded Open Africa in 1995 to create a pan-African network of tourist routes owned and operated by local communities. Noel has developed an innovative methodology which empowers rural communities to organize themselves into tourist routes. The routes are community driven and owned, with Noel’s organization facilitating start up and marketing. Noel developed a participatory workshop method for creating tourist routes within a period that can take as few as 90 days. Once a community or group of villages has expressed interest in joining Open Africa, subsequent development and promotion of the route begins with the formation of a local forum. In most cases it is community members who, having heard about Open Africa, initiate the contact; this sets the project off strongly as it indicates a local desire for change and entrepreneurship. However, as the program has expanded, so has the tendency for routes to be commissioned by outside sources such as local economic development agencies, municipalities, and aid organizations. Either way, the fundamental principle of local ownership and buy-in is respected, with all decisions kept in the hands of participants themselves. The route forums consist of representatives from tourism authorities, small, medium, and micro enterprises, larger tourism businesses, and other stakeholders in the community. At this point, one of the most important decisions is the name that will brand the route and drive publicity efforts. The cluster group meets to determine other plans for the route and to elect a chairperson who co-ordinates and manages the route from that point forward. Noel’s model operates by the mantra: “Start with what you’ve got.” Through a methodology he calls the “Big Five”, Noel encourages communities to think creatively about their assets by identifying what their local treasures are and how to market them. The methodology is premised on the belief that every community possesses valuable aspects of the Big Five: attractions of historical, economical, political, cultural, and/or environmental significance. This process gets people to start believing in their assets and understanding their potential to be a tourist destination. More importantly, it elicits their creative and entrepreneurial energies in developing and sustaining the route. Another consequence of this process is the promotion of conservation, as communities begin to value their natural resources in a new way as potential wealth creators. Open Africa also establishes a monitoring and evaluation system for the route that relies largely on local knowledge and expertise.At the end of the development process, the route is launched on the Open Africa website and at a celebratory induction function. From here the publicity and media work begins. Members of the local, national, and international press are invited and routes are profiled in supportive publications like Africa Geographic. The initial publicity is important as it demonstrates immediate value to participants, fosters local pride, and builds confidence in the strategy. Open Africa’s creative use of online marketing helps make the route competitive by giving it a presence on the web and the wider endorsement of the Open Africa brand. Noel’s interactive Geographic Information Systems (GIS) map gives each community a valued space previously only available to large international tour operators. After the launch, Open Africa has a route supporter who regularly visits the community forums and assists with capacity, networking, further development, consolidations, and other needs. Open Africa also constantly reviews and refines the methodology, the latest component to the strategy being the sharing of best practices among the route forums.The 60 routes developed so far involve 1,614 businesses supporting nearly 20,000 direct jobs, covering a distance of 30,000 kilometers through seven countries. Routes vary in size from very small villages to those that embrace five or six towns. Routes have been developed in both rural and farming communities and in townships of large metropolitan areas. To facilitate route development, communities are encouraged to participate in political and economic life with a unified voice. While it is difficult for single community members to petition their town council to erect signage or pave a road, 50 other route participants joining a common cause amplifies the community’s voice, making it more likely heeded by government officials. In addition to the other elements that go into a successful tourist route, Noel’s model includes locally-owned accommodations. Most are 30 or fewer rooms, and are often located off the beaten path. These community-owned and operated accommodations are an added value to the mix of products that are part of the route and they serve to widen the distribution of revenue. Also, it increases the range of tourists’ experiences through deeper interaction with local people. Open Africa is building numerous partnerships with corporations, departments in national governments and international agencies. Sponsors cover route development costs and are drawn from the private and public sectors, development agencies and charitable trusts. Open Africa developed three pilot routes as part of the core group convened by the South African government for the New Partnership for African Development. During the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the City of Cape Town contracted Open Africa to develop a route featuring sustainable development projects. The Ilha da Mozambique route was developed at the request of the Mozambique government. The latest project is an application to The World Bank to develop a corridor of 19 biodiversity routes stretching from the Western Cape in South Africa via Namibia and Botswana to northern Zambia. With a critical mass of routes already flourishing, Noel’s focus now is on expanding the route network as fast as possible.

Noel spent his early years on his parents’ farm primarily in the company of indigenous people. This influenced him profoundly and instilled an abiding respect and love for the aboriginal culture of Africa, the spirituality of its people, and the abundance of its natural resources. Noel feels that even though his ancestors have been in Africa for more than 350 years, his deep sense of oneness with Africa is unusual for a Caucasian. This feeling is accompanied by a belief that the continent and its people should be occupying a special place in the global community, instead of being hampered by negative perceptions based on inaccuracies. Noel has undertaken various entrepreneurial endeavors over the years, including the start-up of Avis Car Rental in Southern Africa. Inspired by challenges and “pushing the edge of the envelope”, Noel is hard-pressed to see a problem without trying to fix it. He now calls himself a recycled businessman interested primarily in development with an eye for environmental sustainability. In addition to his role with Open Africa, Noel is a member of the Board of the University of Cape Town's Centre for Marine Studies, the IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas, and a founding member of the Peace Parks Foundation.