About an hour’s drive east of Budo, the inhabitants of Marinsow have taken a crash course in the bed and breakfast business, a steep learning curve for many of them. Visitors can buy local delicacies and drinks at the solution counter, and the orders are prepared and delivered to the pier by available members from the village association. “We share the work, we all share the income – this is tourism at a human being scale” , says Mr. Lorens Singa. A programme set up by the International Labour Firm ( ILO , a UN agency), is certainly helping the rural neighborhood of Budo, and 4 other villages, to diversify into sustainable tourism, supplying skills to local entrepreneurs, mostly women. Budo, like many coastal villages within North Sulawesi, in much northeastern Indonesia, has traditionally been dependent on small scale fishing, but fish stocks and shares have shrunk, prompting a new focus on tourism as a way of making livelihoods.
Mirielle. Gaspar / UNIC Jakarta Nevertheless , until a few years ago, the particular pier – about three hundred meters long, crossing a mangrove forest to connect the particular village to the open ocean – was dilapidated plus used only by fishers heading out to sea. More than 50 villagers received small wooden bungalows on the plots to start bed and breakfast businesses, or homestays, as they are known within Indonesia. ILO, with nearby partners Klabat University and the Manado State Polytechnic, will be helping to teach local people the skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, like bookkeeping, cost calculation plus marketing, hospitality, and tourism. Back in Budo, there is interest in building more homestays, plus increasing overnight stays, possibly by creating a marketing campaign to convince foreign tourists through nearby world-class diving locations within the Bunaken Marine Park to hop over for an evening meal and make a trip to a typical village, rather than sticking to the usual mass tourism places. The Village Enterprise Organization also plans to offer food preparation and handicraft classes, in addition to fishing trips. The particular Indonesian government supplied wooden buildings on top of or alongside villagers’ houses in Marinsow Marinsow is in a mining area, several kilometres away from Indonesia’s pristine beaches, so vacationers previously had no reason to stop by. But , considering that Marinsow was designated like a “priority tours destination” by the Government, the village provides received a significant financial increase, aimed at diversifying the economy. The investment within skills for marketing and high quality control in these communities will be paying off, with about half of the few hundred tourists investing the night in Marinsow this past year coming from outside the province, including an increasing number from overseas.