Our core pillars
Sustainability
With utmost purpose
Niara means "with utmost purpose" in Swahili, or Kiswahili, a Bantu language spoken by millions throughout Eastern, Central and Southern Africa.
We aim to guide discerning and conscientious travellers in making better choices for people and place, while ensuring the positive impacts of your travel are maximized where it's needed most.
We achieve this by scrutinizing every chosen partner based on our sustainability pillars so we know that our trips contribute to the long-term sustainability of habitat restoration, wildlife conservation, and local development. And our transparent fee model means that more money goes to those on the ground. In turn, our clients get access to some of the most inspiring people, places and regeneration projects on the planet.
Our pillars
Our three guiding sustainability pillars are Community and Culture, Conservation, and Carbon Footprint.
Community and Culture
Travel has an extraordinary power to connect, transform and empower people from across the globe and all walks of life. To cultivate this, we plan trips that maximise tourism's social and economic benefits for local communities and allow culture and heritage to thrive on their own terms. We only work with partners that operate with the utmost respect for all people and strive to improve collective well-being.
Conservation
Biodiversity supports all life on earth, and it's more important than ever to protect it. Travel has a unique vested interest to conserve beautiful places and inspiring creatures. It also often provides the economic incentive needed to halt the destruction of ecosystems. We ensure that our trips are part of this critical solution by working with experienced and long-term conservation partners.
Footprint
We are acutely aware of our responsibility to reduce carbon emissions and help tackle the climate emergency. Besides contributing to climate solutions via conservation projects on the ground we also send 1% of each trip to carefully selected carbon offsetting projects on each continent. Read more about our carbon commitment.
Our journey
Our commitment is to invest in and improve our sustainability practices and knowledge continually, recognizing that it is a journey.
To start how we mean to go on, we are proud to launch as a Travel Partner of The Long Run. Our Travel Researchers are Global Sustainable Travel Council (GSTC) qualified, and partner properties are selected based on The Long Run and GSTC criteria.
We are also working towards B Corp certification and are signatories of Tourism Declares.
