overall winner
overall winner Nihiwatu, Indonesia
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ihiwatu is a resort with meaning. Its goal is simple: to ease the burden of poverty on the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba through tourism. If that sounds an audacious, even arrogant proposition, the success of this intimate hideaway resort founded by an American couple Claude and Petra Graves, makes you believe that tourists really can do good. There really aren’t that many of them – with just 14 rooms, no more than 600 stay each year, yet they donate an annual average of $400,000 to support a range of health, education and economic initiatives. That money, channelled through a foundation set up by the Graves, is literally saving lives: ‘We have been able to drop malaria infections by 85 per cent in an area of about 90 square miles,’ says Claude. ‘In doing so we have saved the lives of 53 children in the past two years alone, but there would be hundreds more that we have saved but not documented.’ Their Sumba Foundation began by digging wells – 44 to date – now
providing clean water to more than 14,800 people living in 161 villages, and greatly reducing the incidence of dysentery. It has established five health clinics, staffed with 13 nurses and one doctor who rotates between them. Together, they provide reliable healthcare to more than 18,000 people. Malaria medicines are free, and 9,000 specially-treated mosquito nets have been distributed in villages – also free. An extensive malnutrition prevention programme provides 2,000 children with healthy lunches three times a week. Holidaying dentists have helped treated 1,300 villagers, and the clinics provide thousands of reading glasses to the community and bring in surgeons to carry out 280 cataract surgeries during a two-week stay. The Graves also bring in volunteer plastic surgeons who perform cleft palette, burns and other reconstructive surgery. The foundation supports 14 schools in Sumba, building and renovating classrooms, providing books, teaching aids and sports equipment, and funding scholarships for the best students who are also offered jobs when they graduate.
In the community, they have created a range of business opportunities, including five organic farms which sell to Nihiwatu, but their most successful economic initiative is a bio-diesel project which buys up coconuts from 120 families to create the fuel it, too, sells to the resort. Of the 200 staff who work at the resort and for the foundation, 95 per cent are local Sumbanese. ‘We have created employment for hundreds of Sumbanese in an area where there was none at all,’ says Claude. ‘The truth is that we have become the economy.’ Claude Graves didn’t plan to be such a responsible superhero. That’s not to say he had no good intentions. The original concept for his resort included the more traditional way of using a percentage of the profits to do what he could for the local community. But once the former construction manager from New Jersey and his wife arrived in Sumba at the end of the 1980s, they realised that wouldn’t come close to fund what needed doing. ‘We had no idea until we got there how drastic the situation was,’ recalls Claude. ‘It became apparent that we could make all the money in the world and giving ten per cent of it wouldn’t even make a dent. From that point my wife and I committed ourselves to do a whole lot better.’ ‘We spent years working to gain the trust of the community. Sumba is a very remote island with a society that has been living far outside the norm of the rest of the civilised world. ‘In the first years we spent much of our time in the villages sharing our vision to the elders who really had no idea what we were talking about. But we persevered and eventually were accepted by the local tribe and given the approval by the elders to build what is now Nihiwatu. But believe me,
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29/10/2010 15:53