Background

Treesleeper Camp is a development project first of all. The basic idea is that tourism will bring certain profits to the community of Tsintsabis, the village nearby the camp site.

The Foundation for Sustainable Tourism in Namibia (FSTN) has been set up in order to realise the Treesleeper Camp project in Tsintsabis, Namibia. It is a Dutch legal body. The FSTN has 5 board members, them being:

Stasja Koot, M.A.:                                                    Chairman
Jan Peter Loovers, MA:                                             Secretary
Ferry Bounin, M.A.:                                                  Treasurer
Jan Willem den Heeten, M.A.                                     Board member
Dr. Walter van Beek (associate professor):                Board member, advisor

With this project the FSTN and the Tsintsabis Trust aim to contribute the community of Tsintsabis as follows:

1. Extra income: in Tsintsabis there is a need for more sources of income besides agriculture. Tourism will stimulate the small scale economy;
2. Employment: many of the local youngsters think positively about tourism. A fair number of them speak English and is looking for work;
3. Extra focus on improvement of the position of women;
4. Increase of self-esteem of the people by a positive approach of their culture;
5. From an ethical point of view the project is very desirable: in the past the Hei//omn Bushmen were driven out of this area, including the Etosha National Park. By including them in profiting from the growing tourism in their region, they ‘get back a little of what was once taken from them’. Realise that Tsintsabis is a resettlement farm owned by the government of Namibia (the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement) and Hei//omn people are the only ethnical group in Namibia without land of their own;
6. Ecological awareness for tourists as well as inhabitants of Tsintsabis.

The building up of the camp site, the fundraising and the trainings have mostly been done by the FSTN during the years 2002 until 2007. The FSTN has also helped founding the local legal body, the Tsintsabis Trust, who are the legal owner of the project.

Currently the FSTN is still responsible for this website. Also, the chairman of the FSTN, Stasja Koot, still writes articles for the website www.hoever.nl, most of them based on the experiences of Treesleeper Camp.

In the whole process of setting up Treesleeper Camp we (the FSTN and the Tsintsabis Trust) have had a lot of help from many organisations. In some cases they are donors, in other cases NGO’s and/or other institutions. We hereby like to thank the following institutions (for more information click on the link):

In Holland:
Cordaid, www.cordaid.nl;
Dutch Embassy of Namibia (in 2006 this has been replaced by the Honorary Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), www.namibianederland.net;
E3VS, www.e3vs.nl;
Fortis Foundation Nederland, www.fortisfoundation.nl;
Nederlandse Commissie voor Duurzame Ontwikkeling, www.ncdo.nl;
Stichting Emmaus Haarzuilens, www.emmaus-utrecht.nl;
Stichting Kune Zuva, www.kunezuva.nl;
Stichting Wilde Ganzen, www.wildeganzen.nl;

In Namibia:
Bicycle Employment Network Namibia, www.benbikes.org.za;
Embassy of the United States of America, (the Self-Help Programme), www.windhoek.usembassy.gov;
Legal Assistance Centre, www.lac.org.na;
Namibia Nature Foundation, www.nnf.org.na;
Penduka, www.penduka.com;
Raleigh International Namibia, www.raleighinternational.org;
Voluntary Services Overseas, www.vso.org.uk.

For anybody who is interested in more background information on Tsintsabis, Treesleeper Camp, or how the process went please click on one of the links below.