The Conflict

Mountain gorillas represent a culturally, ecologically and economically important resource to the three range countries where they occur, as well as holding significant value for tourists globally. Yet while tourism has provided an economic incentive to preserve mountain gorillas and their habitat to date, they remain critically endangered and are extremely vulnerable to disease transmission, armed conflict, poaching, illegal trade in live infants, and habitat degradation. In addition, tourists have high expectations about their ‘bucket list’ gorilla trekking experience due to a variety of circumstances ranging from social media depictions to the cost of travel. The incentive structure currently in place for all stakeholders in the mountain gorilla tourism industry, an industry which is based on providing exceptional customer service, rewards tour operators who meet tourists’ expectations and demands.

The Solution

In response to this, Wildlife Friendly Enterprise Network (WFEN), in close partnership with the International Gorilla Conservation Programme  (IGCP), a coalition of Fauna and Flora International (FFI), World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and Conservation International (CI), and through a 3-year consultative stakeholder process with the mountain gorilla range state governments, communities, and the private sector, is piloting a first-of-its kind species-focused Certified Gorilla Friendly™ tourism and product certification. The vision for Certified Gorilla Friendly™ is that it would provide the opportunity for continuous improvement of best practices so that even existing excellent tour operations can be improved and recognized for the tourism sector but also to build capacity for a pro-poor approach linking supply and demand in the tourism supply chain for locally grown products to ensure communities in the Park buffer zone are truly benefiting from gorilla tourism income.  Certified Gorilla Friendly™  will serve as a benchmark for best practices against which non-certified operations can measure themselves and, ideally, work towards gaining certification themselves, thus providing the possibility of improving standards for all tour and hospitality operations – “raising the bar” – and initiating important conversations in the range states.

The Conservation Enterprise

Certified Gorilla Friendly™ is the world’s first voluntary tourism label to use expert input on mountain gorilla health, ecology and behavior to create a set of standards for products and tourism which uses market forces to engage tourists as partners in conservation. Certified Gorilla Friendly™ will empower consumers to create change on the ground by putting in place incentives for the protection of one of the world’s most critically endangered species; thus providing increased economic opportunities for some of the most economically disadvantaged park edge communities; and contributing to the conservation of one of the most spectacular and bio-diverse landscapes in the world.

Watch this space for news and updates on our progress.  In the meantime if you are planning on gorilla trekking in the wild, please take the Certified Gorilla Friendly™ Pledge. To learn more about this effort please see the Executive Summary  of the Feasibility Report.

Certified Gorilla Friendly™
International Gorilla Conservation Programme (IGCP
Twitter: Gorilla Friendly and IGCP
Email: christine@wildlifefriendly.org

We thank WWF-Sweden for generously supporting Gorilla Friendly™