SOUTH AFRICA: Table Mountain Trails Open Paths for Unemployed

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Thessa Bos

CAPE TOWN, Oct 16 2006 (IPS) - “There are so many stories to tell, about the mountain, the plants and what they mean to my people. Hiking is a wonderful way to teach tourists more about my culture,” says 27-year-old Noluthando Mathe.

She is one of over 420 long-term unemployed who have been hired as part of the expanded public works programme at the Table Mountain National Park in the coastal city of Cape Town.

The 4.6 million dollar programme aims to boost social development and poverty relief while uplifting the regional tourism economy and protecting the biodiversity of what is probably the city’s most famous landmark.

The project, with financing from the national environmental affairs and tourism department, is enabling the park to develop the Hoerikwaggo Trails. Hoerikwaggo is the word the Khoi, the original inhabitants of the area, used for Table Mountain, and means “Mountain in the Sea”.

To develop the trails, the park is hiring and training unemployed people from the surrounding townships in a number of fields, ranging from construction and conservation to security and guiding.

Townships are areas that were developed for black people under apartheid. Today, they are typically poor areas, where unemployment and its associated problems are rife.

When finished, the park will have developed four Hoerikwaggo Trails – three of which have already been launched over the last eighteen months. The fourth and most challenging trail, the Hoerikwaggo Classic Trail, will take hikers on a six-day journey from the Cape of Good Hope to Table Mountain. Already, this epic trail is being compared to the Inca Trail in Peru.

All the trails are led by expert guides recruited from surrounding communities, who were previously unemployed. Noluthando Mathe lives in the Masiphumelele township in Fish Hoek.

Before becoming a guide, Mathe was unemployed for a long time. Whilst volunteering for an environmental community programme, she heard TMNP was hiring guides and applied immediately. She had to go through a challenging twelve-day selection process, and was ecstatic when she landed the job.

After a year-and-a-half of rigorous training, she officially qualified as a guide in April 2006. Now a proud professional with an extensive knowledge of safety, first aid, navigation, geology and history, Mathe says she loves telling visitors about her heritage.

According to Hoerikwaggo’s training coordinator, Fran Hunziker, guides also get the benefit of exposure: “Visitors get the chance to learn more about the local culture. Our guides, on the other hand, hear about the way of life abroad.”

The experience has made Mathe a more assertive person. She is now determined to explore the opportunities offered in South Africa’s booming tourist industry. “This job has given me the opportunity to offer my daughter a better life. What’s more, I’m setting a positive example.”

As a result, her 10-year-old’s ambitions are already outgrowing her own, says Mathe. “The other day, she told me she wants to be a psychiatrist.”

Although the park is eager to retain their guides, they have made sure their training allows them to develop within the industry. “Their guiding certificates comply with national qualification standards,” says Hunziker. “This means the guides can use their diplomas anywhere in the country and that they can easily top up their knowledge by taking additional courses.”

Although Grabeth Nduna (30) feels “very privileged” to be a Hoerikwaggo guide, he, like Mathe, dreams of spreading his wings when the time is right. “I would like to start my own tourism enterprise,” he says. “Running a business means you have to come up with new ideas all the time. It keeps you focussed.”

Hunziker explains that in time, the park authority aims for its guides to work as independent contractors, who will sub-contract themselves to the park, as well as to others. However, until the trails become a success, the guides will work on a fixed contract.

“We don’t want them to start a business if there isn’t a market for their services yet. Other programmes have made that mistake,” says Hunziker.

Titled ‘Building Paths, Building People’, the construction phase of the Hoerikwaggo project is employing and training around 300 people as part of the national expanded public works programme. They too are all previously unemployed people recruited from surrounding communities.

They are upgrading existing trails as well as cutting fresh paths and building new accommodation for the Hoerikwaggo Trails.

All the workers receive on-site training and many are given the opportunity to complete accredited training programmes at a local college. “The idea is that the workers will all have developed skills that will enable them to compete on the open market, once the programme is complete,” says Lwandiso Reve, construction project manager of the footpath teams.

In addition, the park aims to have developed 40 small-to-medium enterprises by March next year.

Reve explains that they have appointed a number of workers as team leaders, who, in turn, employ their own teams of 12 to 15 people. Backed up by a course in business skills and mentored by the project managers, the team leaders are responsible for paying their team members and have to handle their own business accounts.

“Once their work for the park is done, they should have developed the skills and experience to contract their services to other organisations,” says Reve.

The Hoerikwaggo Trails do not only provide employment for the surrounding townships. The Table Mountain National Park’s motto – ‘The Park for all, the Park forever’ – is a reflection of the need to make the mountain accessible and to awaken an interest in conservation. Hence, the People’s Trail was developed to attract youth from Cape Town’s townships.

Initially, the plan was to build only the Hoerikwaggo Classic Trail. However, says TMNP’s trail manager Stephen Lamb, after some thought the “Robin Hood concept” was developed. To help finance the People’s Trail, TMNP developed the luxury Table Mountain Trail, aimed at the high end of the tourist market.

The two-day People’s Trail (with an overnight stay) is a guided educational hike, which gives the young hikers the opportunity to learn about the environment and conservation, and, equally important, enables them to enjoy being up on the mountains.

For many South Africans, this is a first, says Lamb.