From ATTA®

Africa has never been late to the values that define world-class tourism. Long before sustainable tourism became a global trend, many of its principles were already embedded across the continent and reflected in how visitors experienced Africa. Communicating Impact builds on this strong foundation that celebrates African innovation and community development, while helping tourism businesses measure and communicate impact in ways that are credible, measurable, and aligned with buyer expectations.

Despite being sustainability innovators for generations, African businesses face a structural disadvantage: the frameworks through which global buyers measure and validate sustainability were not designed with Africa in mind. Buyer demand for data is growing, and the cost of not meeting it is market access.

As a membership organisation at the heart of African tourism for over 30 years, ATTA® is uniquely positioned to support a new phase of sustainability maturity across its membership.

Communicating Impact exists to give African operators the practical capacity to translate what they have and what they have always done into a language buyers require, without diminishing the rich story in the process.

This guide is the product of a strategic collaboration with The Long Run, a specialist member-led organisation with 16 years of proven best practice, whose tools and frameworks help operators measure and communicate their impact. We are proud of this partnership. We hope this guide is a first step towards equipping ATTA® members with credible, actionable tools that are practical rather than burdensome; that help them measure what matters, communicate responsibly, and position African tourism as a global leader in holistic sustainability.

Kgomotso Ramothea
Chief Executive Officer, African Travel & Tourism Association

From The Long Run

What the African tourism and hospitality industry lacks is not commitment to impact. It is the language to demonstrate it.

That is what we have repeatedly seen working with nature-based tourism businesses across Africa and beyond. The commitment runs deep. Operators are making decisions every day that put conservation first, that build genuine relationships with communities, that refuse shortcuts because they understand the true cost of taking them. The impact is real. What proves harder is translating that commitment into something tangible, something that travels up the supply chain, reaches the buyer, and lands with the guest; that is where the gap becomes quite acute.

This guide exists to close that gap.

At The Long Run, we have always started from impact rather than efficiency. Not ‘do you have the right policies in place?’, but rather: ‘what is the change you are aspiring to, and how does your work contribute to it?’ The 4C Framework, running throughout this guide, reflects that thinking. Conservation, Community, Culture, and Commerce are not four separate boxes to tick. They are four interconnected pillars of a business that understands its role in the broader system it operates within. When all four are working together, the impact story is already there. The job at hand is to share that impact credibly and in a way that resonates through the value chain.

We are proud to bring that framework to a wider audience through this partnership with ATTA, and glad to share what sixteen years of working alongside some of the most committed operators in the world has taught us: that doing good is not enough. The work needs to be visible, specific, and honest. That is what this guide will help you do, and as The Long Run, we are here to support you on that journey.

Dr. Anne-Kathrin Zschiegner
Executive Director, The Long Run

What you will find here are practical tools for examining what you are already doing, finding the story inside it, and sharing it with the people who need to hear it.

One thing to state before we begin: the conservation models, community partnerships, and cultural stewardship practices being developed across Africa are among the most instructive in the world. This guide exists to help you communicate that, on your terms, in your voice, with the specificity it deserves.

And while this guide focuses on communication, it is underpinned by a simple fact: sustainability that exists only in your marketing materials is not sustainability. The businesses that communicate impact most convincingly are the ones where it shows up in procurement decisions, in how they hire, in what they refuse to do, and in how they think about financial resilience. Communication that is not rooted in practice will not hold.

How to use this guide

You can read it straight through or go directly to the section that is most pressing right now. Each section ends with a Quick Action.

Tools in this guide

Most businesses that struggle to communicate their impact are not struggling because they lack stories or evidence. The problem is usually that the values driving the business have never been fully said out loud, or that what was once clear has become so familiar it’s become invisible.

This section helps you bring that back into focus: the mission and values that should run through everything you communicate, from a trade pitch to a guide briefing to an Instagram caption.

What your why is — and what it is not

Starting with your mission

Your mission is not a sustainability statement. It is the reason your business exists. When your conservation work, community relationships, and cultural commitments flow from a clearly articulated mission, they feel coherent. This builds trust.

The businesses that communicate their impact most naturally are usually the ones that can answer three questions without hesitating:

If different people in your business give different answers, this is the right moment to work on it.

Finding the why in the everyday

Think about what motivates your team. If you asked each of them why they work here, what would they say? If they struggle to answer, or simply say ‘because it pays well’, that is useful information: it tells you the why has not yet made it far enough into the organisation to anchor how you talk about yourselves to the outside world. That is not a failure; it is simply where the work begins. But if the answer involves a place, a community, a way of doing things that matters to them personally, that is the story.

Often the why is already there, lived out in daily decisions, long before anyone has written it down.

Before you can communicate your impact, you need to know what you are working with. That means taking honest stock, not to build a report, but to find the raw material for a story.

The 4C Framework: four pillars of impact

The Long Run’s 4C Framework organises impact across four interconnected pillars. Looking honestly at your work across all four before asking whether you can prove any of it is the most useful place to begin. The connections between the pillars matter as much as the pillars themselves.

For accommodation providers, much of this impact is direct, shaped by what happens on your own land and in your own operation. For DMCs, tour operators and other travel businesses, it works differently but matters just as much: your impact comes through influence and design, where you send clients, who you choose as suppliers, and how you build an itinerary. Both forms of impact count equally. As you work through the questions, read them through whichever lens fits your business.

Conservation

What are you doing to protect and support the natural environment your business depends on, directly and through the choices you make for others?

1. Which specific ecosystems, species, or habitats does your business actively protect, monitor, or direct clients and funding towards? For an operator, this includes the destinations and properties you prioritise because of the conservation they sustain.
2. What have you refused to do, or stopped doing, because it would damage the environment, whether on your own land or in the suppliers, routes and destinations you decline to sell?
3. Do you have a conservation partner, a research relationship, or a land-management commitment, or bookings and fees that channel money into protection? What can they point to as evidence of impact?
4. How are you using natural resources responsibly — water, energy, materials, waste, and reducing footprint across the travel chain, including transport, length of stay, and supplier practices?

Community

Who benefits from this business being here, beyond your guests and your bottom line, and how far does that reach across everyone you touch?

1. What does this business mean for the people closest to your operation? For a property, what share of permanent staff come from local communities, and what does a job here mean for their families? For an operator, how do your partnerships and bookings sustain local livelihoods?
2. What share of your purchasing stays in the local economy? Can you name your key local suppliers, guides and DMCs? Are they locally owned and community-led?
3. Are there community members, elders, or organisations whose knowledge and authority your business actively respects and resources?
4. How do you shape the way your guests engage with communities — how they spend, how they behave, how they come to understand the place they are visiting?

Culture

Is the living culture of the destination genuinely present in what you offer guests, and is it led by the people whose culture it is?

1. Who in your team or community carries and shares the cultural knowledge of this place? Is that person recognised and valued for it?
2. How do you make sure cultural elements are led by the communities themselves, rather than packaged for visitors?
3. Could a guest leave with a specific understanding of the place, its history, its stories, its people, that they genuinely could not have found anywhere else?
4. Does what you offer reflect culture as living and evolving, contemporary artists, chefs, makers and ways of life — rather than only heritage and the past?

Commerce

Is your business financially strong enough to sustain all of the above over the long term? Commerce is the engine that makes the other three possible.

1. Does your pricing reflect the real cost of operating with integrity, or are you absorbing those costs in ways that are not sustainable?
2. If your revenue dropped significantly next season, which of your values commitments would come under pressure first? That answer tells you something important.
3. How does the way you make money create the conditions for conservation, community, and cultural commitments to continue, and how does money flow back into them through bookings, fees or partnerships?
4. Is sustainability embedded in how you make decisions, in procurement, in hiring, in what you choose not to do, or does it exist primarily in your communications?
5. How resilient is your business to shocks (political, economic, climate), and how diverse are your revenue streams, partnerships and supplier relationships?

The 4C Framework is The Long Run’s own methodology, used across our global membership to measure and communicate holistic impact. To explore the framework further and learn about The Long Run’s work with accommodation providers and travel businesses, visit thelongrun.org.

You have taken stock of your impact, and you are ready to get into the storytelling. At this point it is prudent to pause and discuss the big legislative elephant in the room – regulation.

3.1  What the new rules mean for your sustainability claims

For as long as this industry has talked about sustainability, the rules around what you could say were largely unwritten. Vague language was everywhere. Generic claims went unchallenged. That is changing — significantly, and soon.

On 27 September 2026, the European Union’s Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (Directive EU 2024/825, known as EmpCo) comes into force. From that date, environmental claims made to European consumers must be specific, substantiated, and verifiable. The scope is deliberately broad: if European consumers are seeing your sustainability claims, directly or through a trade partner, you are in scope whether you are a lodge in Botswana with German guests or a tour operator in Nairobi listed on a Dutch booking platform.

The penalties are serious: fines of at least 4% of annual turnover in the relevant country, confiscation of revenues from non-compliant claims, exclusion from public procurement, and mandatory corrective advertising at the company’s expense.

For African operators, the practical consequence is simple: the trade partners who sell your product to European travellers are now legally responsible for the sustainability claims they make. They will ask their suppliers to substantiate those claims, or they will find suppliers who can.

The operators best positioned under the new rules are not necessarily those with the most sophisticated sustainability programmes; they are the ones who can document and communicate what they are already doing, specifically and honestly. The habits this guide asks you to build, specific claims, evidenced outcomes, honest acknowledgement of what you are still working on, are exactly the habits that make a business compliant. Doing this well is no longer just good communication. It is a legal baseline.

Sources: European Commission, Directive (EU) 2024/825; EarthCheck, ‘The EU just changed the rules on tourism marketing’, June 2026. This section is for guidance only and does not constitute legal advice.

3.2  Data & evidence

The regulation chapter told you what you cannot say without evidence. Now, what evidence looks like and what you need to start?

There is a common assumption that proper impact measurement requires a dedicated sustainability manager, a reporting platform, or a full audit cycle. For most African tourism businesses, those things are not realistic at the start. What is realistic is a minimum viable dataset: a defined set of data points, collected consistently year on year, that gives you the foundation to make credible claims, satisfy trade-partner due diligence, and meet regulatory scrutiny when the time comes.

Why collecting minimum data matters

What does that defined set of data points look like in practice? That is work The Long Run does with its members every day. For this guide we have developed a baseline measurement framework aligned with GRI, GSTC, Travalyst, and the WTTC Hotel Sustainability Basics, calibrated to what is achievable for operations without dedicated reporting infrastructure. If you are ready to put structured measurement in place but do not know where to start, the tool in the appendix is a great place to begin.

The framework we’ve developed for this guide aligns with several global standards and reflects best practices in data collection. Most of the data you will already have, while some you will need to start collecting. None requires specialist infrastructure to track.

3.3  From evidence to story: saying it specifically

Having the data is not the same as having the story. The data is the foundation. The story is what happens when you ask one question of it: what does this number mean for the people involved in it?

That question is the translation step. To find the insight in any data point, ask: if I showed this number to the person most connected to what it represents, what would it mean to them? Their answer is your insight.

Here is what that translation looks like in practice. The left column is where most operators start. The right column is where this guide is asking you to get to.

Leading with a person, not a programme

The most reliable way to close the gap between evidence and story is to move the camera from the programme to the person. A programme is abstract. A person is specific. And specificity, a name, a place, a detail particular to this business and nowhere else, is what makes a story worth trusting.

For each of the 4Cs where your business is creating real impact, ask: is there one person, a guide, a waiter, a community partner, a supplier, whose relationship with this business is the most honest expression of that work? That person is the anchor. The data and outcomes make the anchor credible.

In most African tourism businesses, the impact story lives at the property: the lodge, the conservancy, or town, this is where the conservation work happens, where community relationships are built, where the cultural knowledge resides. It is also, too often, where the story stops.

By the time a guest books a trip, they have usually passed through two or three intermediaries. Whether your story arrives with them intact or dissolves somewhere along the way into generic sustainability language, depends almost entirely on whether you have made it easy to carry.

Audience 1  ·  Trade — agents, tour operators, DMCs

Trade partners are not buying your sustainability story; they are buying confidence. Confidence that they can describe your property accurately, stand behind what they say if pressed, and book you without creating problems to manage later. They need something they can repeat in two or three sentences without having to simplify it, something they can verify, and something that connects directly to the experience they are selling, not a sustainability appendix, but the reason this place is worth visiting.

Liesel van Zyl of Go2Africa works with around 1,400 suppliers. Her observation is pointed: operators who have invested in certification, even early-stage certification, are significantly easier to sell. Not because buyers require a badge, but because the process of getting certified forces operators to document and articulate what they are already doing. The story becomes portable.

Richard Walton is direct about what agents actually need from you: ‘Tell them about the child whose school was built through lodge revenues, the ranger who was trained from the community, the species that came back. Give them something they can repeat in a conversation, not a PDF they’ll forget.’

Wetu’s analysis of agent behaviour reveals something straightforward and important: the properties that get selected most often are not always the most famous or the closest to the game reserve. They are the ones whose supplier profile gives the agent the most to work with. Taking it a step further Wetu now offers a dedicated Sustainability Profile feature, allowing suppliers to document and share their practice directly within their agent-facing profiles. Read more here.

Audience 2  ·  Guests — in-destination storytelling

Most travellers do not book a trip because of a property’s sustainability credentials. Research consistently shows that value, experience quality, and destination appeal come first. The word ‘sustainability’ can actually create distance rather than desire: it can sound like a constraint, a lecture, or something the traveller is expected to feel guilty about.

Impact does not replace the experience. It deepens it. The most powerful impact communication you will ever do happens not in a brochure or a trade pitch, but in the experience itself. In-destination storytelling is about building experiences in which the impact is visible and real, where the people, the place, and the practice do the communicating. Your job is to create the conditions for that: to invest in the guides, community liaisons, and cultural interpreters who carry the story, and to give them the space to share it in their own voice. The guest does not need to know they are receiving an impact communication. They just need to feel that this place is real, and that it matters.

Audience 3  ·  Media — journalists, editors, travel writers

A journalist is not looking for a sustainability project. They are looking for a story their readers will care about, that their editor will commission, and that they can stand behind when it is published. The story itself is usually about a person, a decision, a consequence, or a surprise.

Many operators pitch their impact practice as the story. What they should be pitching is the human story their impact practice has made possible. ‘We have an award-winning conservation programme’ is not a story. ‘The man who has counted every elephant in this ecosystem for eighteen years, and what he saw change’ is a story.

The detail that seems too local is often the detail that makes the story worth telling. Find the one sentence, the one image, the one fact that opens the door to everything else — and lead with that.

The context matters. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Risks Report ranked misinformation and disinformation as the number-one short-term global risk — ahead of climate change, inequality, and armed conflict. In that environment, bold sustainability claims without substance will backfire faster than ever. But the flip side is powerful: authentic, evidenced impact builds trust faster than any promotion.

Greenwashing means creating a misleading impression of your environmental or social impact through overclaiming, vague language, selective emphasis, or presenting ambitions as if they were already achieved. In tourism it is usually not deliberate. It is a habit, and like most habits, it is easier to break once you can see it clearly.

Greenhushing is the mirror failure: saying less than you should, leaving real work unacknowledged, and quietly removing yourself from a conversation your industry badly needs you in.

The patterns to recognise

These patterns are not exclusive to bad actors. They show up in the communications of businesses doing genuinely good work. Naming them is not an accusation; it is a starting point.

If you saw yourself in any of those: good. That awareness is the beginning of replacing them with something more honest and, in practice, more persuasive.

The three-question test

Before you use any impact claim, in a trade pitch, a client itinerary, on your website, in a social post, run it through three questions. If the answers are all yes, communicate with confidence. If any one gives you pause, that is where to do more work before you publish.

The practice: notice, record, share

What impact communication looks like when it is working.

Principles only get you so far. The case studies that follow show what the ideas in this guide look like when they are being lived by real businesses, in real African operating contexts. They are not polished success stories: each one contains a moment of genuine difficulty: a decision that cost something, a gap that had to be owned, a point where the right path was harder than the easy one.

That is what makes them instructive. Read them for what is specific, not for what is inspiring.

Borana Conservancy, Kenya — © James Lewin  ·  Singita — Kruger National Park, South Africa — © Ross Couper

Conservation

Segera

A founding member of The Long Run and a certified Global Ecosphere Retreat®. Over two decades, Segera has transformed 50,000 acres of degraded cattle ranch on Kenya’s Laikipia plateau into a thriving wildlife sanctuary.

Technology for conservation – a good-news story

While most people churn out AI posts shrouded in fear and hysteria, Segera told the story of how they are using AI to reduce the cost of conservation. The team was clever to publish a piece of hope and goodwill at a time when AI is so often associated with threat. The full story ended up in Fortune magazine, earning plenty of positive press and eyeballs. Read the piece in Fortune.

The lesson: take a mainstream conversation and turn it on its head. It pays to look at things differently.

Kwandwe

Kwandwe has reclaimed 30,000 hectares of farmland in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, for wildlife conservation, reintroducing endangered black rhino and returning cheetah to the Great Fish River Valley for the first time since 1888.

Socials done simply, and well

One of Kwandwe’s top-performing Instagram videos is about two lions being relocated to Nambiti Private Game Reserve. It’s a simple reel made up of photo and video content shot from a phone (no massive marketing budgets). But it resonates because the moment is real and rare, the kind of behind-the-scenes footage guests almost never get to see.

The lesson: being there matters more than production value. If you are present for the moments that matter, a phone is enough.

Community

Singita

Singita’s Lebombo and Sweni lodges sit in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, where the Singita Lowveld Trust, their non-profit partner in the Greater Kruger region, drives conservation and community work towards Singita’s 100-year purpose.

Lead with feeling, let the numbers prove it

With so much content fighting for attention, we have to whittle stories down to what makes people feel something, then back the story up with numbers. Singita does this expertly on just one page with their Lowveld Trust Impact Dashboards. They open with a short YouTube video that has you smiling, with a few tears welling up, in the first 40 seconds. The narrator’s passion carries the story, and you start to care about what the numbers mean. Singita does not give a school ‘resources’ (a stodgy word that means nothing); it gives a child blocks to play with. In a safe school environment with enough food, that child can play freely, use their imagination, and may just become a builder one day. What Singita has actually done is give 2,113 children bordering their Singita Sabi Sand and Kruger properties a chance at a better life.

The lesson: lead with feeling, and let the numbers prove it.

House in the Wild

A family-run, eight-room lodge on the banks of the Mara River in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, whose founders established the 6,000-acre community-based Enonkishu Conservancy.

Bringing community voices to the forefront

The team see themselves as custodians of a small part of the wider Maasai community, with a responsibility to use their business to give back to those who cared for this place long before they arrived. Local leader Jane Nashipae has become an award-winning activist, and House in the Wild weaves her voice seamlessly into their own — across their website, their Instagram, and their press. But it does not only live online: after Jane tells the story of her Trees in the Wild nursery project, guests are invited to plant a tree with her. They leave as stewards rather than consumers, and they carry the story far and wide long after their trip has ended. The project has been so successful that government officials now ask for Jane’s help to meet Kenya’s target of planting 15 billion trees by 2032. As she told House & Garden UK, with a giggle: “We’ve had a 90 per cent success rate. They should have listened to us first.”

The lesson: give a community leader’s voice the same platform you would give a founder. Jane is not a beneficiary in this story — she is one of its leaders, and the storytelling treats her that way.

Culture

Cottar’s Safaris

In the safari business since 1919, Cottar’s sits on a conservancy in Kenya’s Maasai Mara owned by a 7,300-strong community of Maasai landowners and was the first property in the world to earn Global Ecosphere Retreat® certification.

Bringing out the quirkiness and fun of Maasai culture

Cottar’s have racked up millions of fans on TikTok by getting the local Maasai community behind the camera. The intent is to make sure Maasai team members have the strongest voice in how their heritage is represented and shared (rather than a top-down approach). The secret to their viral success is that they do not take themselves too seriously; the quirks and humour of each character are what make the storytelling magnetic.

The lesson: impact storytelling is allowed to be funny. In a sector that takes itself very seriously, a sense of humour travels far.

Sasaab

A lodge in northern Kenya’s Westgate Community Conservancy, home to over 600 Samburu families, where guest fees fund conservation and community development. Sasaab is a certified Global Ecosphere Retreat®.

‘Earth Smiles’ — turning a technical concept into a story everyone understands

In Samburu, semi-circular pits dug into degraded land capture rainwater that would otherwise wash away. That is the technical version. The version that travelled is the one in the name: the pits are shaped like half-moons, so the project calls them Earth Smiles. Spearheaded by Justdiggit, with Sasaab’s Footprint Trust donating grass seeds and joining the digging, the project has grown from 1,000 bunds in 2022 to 90,000 bunds today. The digging events unite partners and the Samburu community, and the women who dug now run grass-seed banks that earn income for their families. The proof is told in the simplest format there is: a photo of bare earth, and a photo of the same spot six months later, green.

The lesson: the simplest devices work hardest. If people can visualise it, they are far more likely to buy into it.

Commerce

Tswalu

South Africa’s largest privately owned game reserve, Tswalu is an ambitious regeneration project conserving 118,000 hectares of the southern Kalahari, carbon neutral since 2019 and a certified Global Ecosphere Retreat®.

Tswalu earns carbon credits, and the story reaches people who’ve never read a conservation report

Tswalu became the first privately protected area in southern Africa to earn carbon credits through wildlife management. Wild animals graze, the soil stores more carbon, and the credits fund conservation. More than 34,000 credits have been issued so far, verified by Credible Carbon.

What’s interesting is who the story reached. It didn’t just grab the attention of people already passionate about conservation. It featured in Nedbank’s report and is now capturing the attention of finance people, an audience conservation storytelling almost never reaches.

The lesson: if you tell an impact story in the language of commerce, new audiences listen (and new funders arrive).

HBD Príncipe

A sustainable ecotourism and agroforestry company on São Tomé and Príncipe, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, where more than 500 employees work towards conservation and community development on the rainforest island.

HBD Príncipe SOMA proves that clear beats clever

SOMA is a direct community project from the HBD Príncipe sustainability team. Their website is incredibly effective. What they do (surf therapy) and why it matters (you can change the lives of young African women) is crystal clear within the first 20 seconds of landing on the page. The bold, moody photography brings these words to life.

Once they’ve captured your attention and made you care about the cause, they back it up with facts and stats.

The lesson: the transparency does the closing: you donate because you know exactly where your money is going.