+ What is your name?

Aayusha

+ Are you submitting as a team or as an individual?

Team submission

+ Where are you located?

Nepal

+ In one sentence, tell us about your idea.

Community Homestay Network is a social enterprise, a developer and provider of community-based tourism experiences across Nepal that benefits locals directly.

+ Describe your ideal collaborative partner or partners.

We are looking for collaborative partners who would help us amplify our message of strengthening community-based tourism via community homestays. It would be great if we could communicate our ideas to international programs to share our business models and support promoting community tourism in Nepal. We would appreciate support from content creators and writers

+ What is the most immediate or most pressing challenge you're facing right now?

Difficulty in connecting and networking with right partner.

+ What is it about your idea that makes you feel good?

With limited exposure to technology and marketing, rural communities are not able to promote their diverse culture and landscapes to the full potential which further perpetuates existing inequality between small and big businesses. Similar to the global discourse of inequality, most of the revenue generated from the tourism industry in Nepal has been distributed to the highly commercial business owners rather than the communities. After this realization, Community Homestay Network was established in 2017 with the goal to promote tourism that benefits locals and women directly. We feel good that our social enterprise is working towards curbing these problems and trying our best to continue our efforts in building resilient communities through a tourism value-chain approach.

+ Ideally, when would you launch this idea?

I've already launched my idea

+ At Sigmund, we are interested in ideas at the intersection of People, Planet, and Profit. How does your idea relate to these three categories?

At Community Homestay Network, our focus is to bring the benefits of tourism to local communities. We work with communities that have traditionally been deprived of tourism dollars to ensure that the benefits of tourism reach them. Also, by focusing on alternative destinations where our homestays are located we hope to take the environmental and social burden off some of the more overcrowded tourism destinations. We work with grassroots communities to develop attractive tourism experiences through a value-chain approach. We work with communities to develop and upgrade their tourism products, train them on topics ranging from hygiene to hospitality, help them bring their product to a certain standard and promote them on the global market through digital platforms. Community Homestay Network also trains the homestays in its network to implement sustainable practices, such as providing clean purified water in reusable water bottles rather than plastic water bottles, which is one of the major sources of plastic pollution in Nepal. Furthermore, homestays are trained to provide food with ingredients sourced locally.

+Your website URL

https://www.communityhomestay.com/