Can a Kilimanjaro Expedition Create Meaningful Local Impact? Five Lessons From Our First Summit for a Cause

This August, Visit Natives took 13 women to the summit of Kilimanjaro. Reaching 5,895 metres was a huge achievement, but from the start we wanted the journey to have a purpose beyond the top of the mountain: to build a tangible local impact into the expedition itself, without asking every participant to run a separate fundraising campaign.

Visit Natives specialises in journeys created together with Indigenous and local communities, so this was a natural extension of how we already work in Tanzania. Our first Summit for a Cause expedition was connected to a solar power project in a Maasai community we have worked with for years: the group climbed Kilimanjaro, and their journey helped make it possible to install solar panels there.

Our first Summit for a Cause: the group climbed Kilimanjaro, and their journey helped bring solar power to a Maasai community we’ve partnered with for years.

The experience made me think harder about the way we talk about charity, impact and “giving back” in tourism. There are many good initiatives in our industry, but one question sits behind all of them: who actually decides what kind of impact tourism should create?

Here are five lessons we learned from our first Summit for a Cause:

1. Not all charity climbs are the same

Kilimanjaro has become one of the world’s best-known mountains for charity challenges, but the term “charity climb” can describe very different financial models. One climber might pay for the entire expedition personally and fundraise separately for a charity. Another might join an organised challenge where participants commit to raising a minimum sponsorship amount, some of which may go towards the cost of the expedition itself.

Neither approach is inherently better or worse; both can raise significant sums for important causes. But transparency matters. Travelers, and particularly the people donating to them, should understand how the model works and whether the money raised goes entirely to the cause or also funds the journey.

With Summit for a Cause, we took another approach. Participants pay for their own expedition and are not required to fundraise. Instead, a contribution towards one clearly defined local project is built into the concept from the beginning, so the impact doesn’t depend on how successful individuals are at asking friends, family or colleagues for donations.

I recently wrote a more detailed guide (link at end of this article) comparing these models and looking at where the money actually goes. What struck me while researching it was how different two trips described by exactly the same words — “climbing Kilimanjaro for charity” — can be.

2. The community should be the first to be asked, not the last

For me, the more difficult question is not how to raise the money but what happens next. Tourism companies and travelers often have very good intentions, but good intentions can still produce projects based on what outsiders believe a community needs rather than what people have identified for themselves.

This matters to us because much of our work takes place with Indigenous communities. We bring travelers into other people’s homes, cultures and environments, and that comes with a responsibility not to assume we know what development or a “better life” should look like for them. The principle that guides the cultural experiences we create has to apply when money or resources are involved too.

With our Maasai partners, solar power was a practical need. Traditional Maasai homes have very little natural light, and after sunset families have long relied on fire and other fuel-based sources. Solar lighting offers another option, and the electricity can also charge mobile phones, now an important part of communication and everyday life in Maasai communities.

For our Maasai partners, solar meets a practical need: light in homes that get little after dark, and power to charge the phones now central to everyday life.

There can be economic benefits too. A household with solar electricity can charge other people’s phones for a small fee, a modest source of income. And reliable light around the boma is useful at night, when livestock needs checking and predators such as hyenas are about.

None of this is revolutionary technology, and that is part of the point. A tourism impact project doesn’t have to be large or impressive to be useful. It has to make sense to the people who will actually use it.

3. What happens after the mountain matters as much as the summit

One element we deliberately built into the model was continuing the journey after Kilimanjaro. Once the group came down from the mountain, we travelled together to the Maasai community connected to the project. Participants could see the solar installations themselves, but the purpose wasn’t simply to inspect what their money had bought.

We spent time there, talked, ate together and learned more about everyday life. For the travelers, it connected an extraordinary mountain experience to the country and people around it. For us, it was part of being transparent about what we mean when we say an expedition creates local impact.

Connecting an extraordinary climb to the country and people around it.

This is something our industry needs to be far more specific about. “Supporting local communities” appears everywhere in responsible tourism marketing, but it can mean almost anything. If we make the claim, we should be able to say which community, what is being supported, who decided it was needed and what actually happened as a result.

4. Impact should be designed for the community, not the traveler

There is another side to this that tourism businesses need to acknowledge. Responsible travel has become increasingly important to consumers, which is positive, but it also means impact has become valuable as a marketing tool. Once travelers actively seek experiences that “give back”, companies have a commercial incentive to satisfy that desire.

That can subtly change the starting point of a project. Instead of asking what would be genuinely useful locally, we end up asking what travelers would feel good about supporting. Projects that are easy to photograph, explain and package into a story become more attractive than less visible things a community may consider more important.

We think about this a lot. Our travelers naturally want to know their presence has a positive impact, and that is a good thing, but Indigenous communities do not exist to provide visitors with the experience of helping them. Any impact model has to preserve local agency and dignity rather than turning people into beneficiaries in someone else’s travel story.

The relationship matters too. We didn’t arrive in an unfamiliar village with solar panels because we needed a project for a Kilimanjaro expedition. It grew out of an existing relationship with a community we already work with, and that makes a significant difference to how needs get discussed and how the impact continues after the travelers go home.

5. Start with the relationship, not the project

Our first Summit for a Cause was relatively small: 13 women, one expedition, one solar project. I wouldn’t claim we have found the perfect model for impact tourism, and there are many ways tourism can contribute to destinations. What the experience reinforced was the importance of starting with the relationship rather than the project.

Tourism has an extraordinary ability to move resources around the world. Travelers spend on accommodation, guides, transport, food and experiences, and adventure tourism often brings that spending into rural areas that would otherwise see little of it. If we want to create additional social impact on top of that, we need to think just as carefully about how the value is distributed as about how much is generated.

For us, that means asking whether the people we work with have a genuine role in deciding what happens, whether the impact suits their community and whether we can clearly explain to travelers where their contribution goes. It also means accepting that the most useful project isn’t always the most exciting one to market.

The summit of Kilimanjaro is spectacular, and standing at 5,895 metres with our group was something I will never forget. But when I think about what I want our expeditions to represent, I don’t want the story to end with a summit photograph. I want our travelers to come home understanding more about the country they visited, the people who live there and the role tourism can play when local communities are treated as partners rather than as part of the product.

If you’d like to go deeper, I wrote a longer guide unpacking how “charity climb” can mean very different things, and how to tell where your money is really headed. Read it at Kilimanjaro Charity Climbs: Where Does the Money Actually Go?.

Anniina Sandberg is the founder of Visit Natives, a travel company creating journeys together with Indigenous and local communities. She led the first Summit for a Cause expedition to Kilimanjaro.