Selous Safari Company, established over 30 years ago, has long played an active and committed role in its local communities, with contributions towards animal conservation, community investment and people development. This approach forms an integral part of the company’s vision to protect and preserve its natural and local environment, with a focus on sustainable tourism. This recent project in Ras Kutani showcases this commitment, described in this blog by Camp Manager, Simon..

Ras Kutani has a very close relationship with the surrounding communities and villages, in particular with Kichangani, the village where quite a few of our staff members come from.

We always recommend our guests to go and visit this village with one of our waiters, and quite a few of you readers of this blog may have done so, with Joseph, John P or John S!

Seeing how Mama Salama (the lady who makes the Mkeka baskets), the teachers, the children, the chairman and all the rest of the village always welcomed us with open arms we wanted to give back to the village as well. Kichangani didn’t have a nursery school and as a result the young children (aged 3-6) either had to walk 8km every day to go to the closest school or were just not going to school. Therefore, following consultation with the village Chairman and in response to the needs of the community, it was decided to focus our efforts on a project to build a nursery school.

After more than a year of fundraising (in large part thanks to our very generous guests that visited the village), project planning and overseeing the build, we can proudly say we have now finished building the school, and the new school year has started in the brand-new nursery!

One of the main goals of building the nursery school was to make education more accessible for the young children in the village and give them a better chance growing up.

We have reached that goal: last year there were 35 children in the improvised school of the village; now, at the start of the new school year in the new nursery school, there are 90!

Kichangani and Ras Kutani would like to thank all our guests who made a contribution towards the school. It will have a big impact on development in the area and the children are SUPER happy... as you can see in the following pictures!