Grupo de Emprendimientos Ambientales: It’s Official!

The long-awaited acceptance package has finally arrived, confirming my 2012-2013 field placement with GEA in Huancayo, Peru.  As noted in the previous post, a link to GEA’s website can be found on the right-hand side of the blog. Fortunately, GEA maintains a well-organized, professionally presented, and moderately up-to-date website rife with information.  Unfortunately, the ‘English Version’ link found on the site is merely decorative, and won’t, despite what you might expect, actually take you to an English version of the website.  Because of this, I have decided that it might be useful to explain in English the many doings of this organization, with a particular focus on the community-based sustainable tourism program that I will be working with in September.

GEA, whose full title is ‘Grupo de Empredimientos Ambientales’ or ‘Group of Environmental Entrepreneurs’, is a Lima-based not-for-profit, founded in 1992.  Though technically a non-governmental organization, GEA prefers to refer to itself as a ‘business with social and environmental goals’.  GEA works to support environmentally and socially sustainable development by promoting green technologies, processes, and practices in four main areas: businesses, cities, tourism and community organizations, and schools.

During my placement, I’ll be working with one of GEA’s community organization and tourism support programs in the rural region of Huancayo.  These programs focus on the provision of the resources needed to design and manage successful tourism operations, including the design of necessary infrastructure and support for businesses and arts groups. I was glad to see that GEA’s approach to sustainable tourism recognizes that fact that tourism can often be invasive, exclusive, and damaging to communities.  GEA maintains a focus on promoting organizations that are owned, operated, and sustained by communities themselves, in such a way that the economic benefits are enjoyed by the whole community. 

I must say, I was somewhat skeptical when I first learned that I would be working to promote tourism in rural areas in Peru.  The idea of creating organizations for the purpose of allowing wealthy people to travel to and spend money in poor villages seemed like less than my ideal vision of sustainable development.  I was relieved, however, to see the emphasis that GEA places on ensuring that the benefits of tourism accrue to all members of each community. Tourism may not be the perfect development solution in many cases, but it does provide poor families with opportunities to augment incomes, generating wealth that can then be used to improve access to education and health care.  Tourism may appear to be a solution that merely treats symptoms of the disease of global inequality and it may leave something to be desired by many a radical ID student, yet I believe that it does present Peruvian communities with a home-grown means of overcoming many of the problems of poverty.  GEA’s programs offer a pragmatic solution to many who can’t wait for the implementation of a New World Order to solve their day-to-day problems.

 Thanks for reading.  I would love to hear comments.

Dan