Nomad’s team of guides are a cornerstone to our company and many have been with us since our very early days. Our innovative micro finance scheme helps them raise funds so they can purchase and earn money from their own fully equipped 4WD safari vehicles
Joining Nomad’s founding families and pioneering some of the very first camps in our wild corners of Tanzania, this is not a journey we have travelled alone, and we are proud of how far we have come together with our guides. Knowing what an important role they play in our operations, we take care in keeping them in the heart of our business model and it is with them in mind that we developed our guide micro-finance scheme. Not only do we invest in up-skilling our fundis, cooks, and back-of-house staff when they want to train and become guides themselves, and you will be surprised how many of our guides started in the kitchen before we put them behind the wheel, but we have worked hard to develop a program and partnership with our guides that works for us both.
Our unique vehicle micro-finance program loans our guides funds to buy and equip their own safari vehicles. From then on every day our guides are on safari, they earn a daily rental rate for their vehicle as well as their guide fee. Nearly a decade on and we have now rolled the program out to all of our camp based guides in the South and West.
Nomad guides and their fleet of safari vehicles are iconic, not just for their Nomad colours and individual vehicle designs and fittings, but every one is a representation of how we are working together with our people on the ground to make sure that we share in the profits of our hard work. Guides take great pride in maintaining their own cars (which is a bonus for us), and we are proud of how successful our vehicle micro-finance program has become. It is not long before loans are re-paid and guides are planning where to invest their extra income. Earning more, they are able to improve the lives of them and their families, but our guides are an industrious lot and they rarely stop there. When not out on safari, many of our guides are busy building houses to rent, opening mini-shops in their neighbourhood, and running small-businesses. We get great pleasure when things come full circle and some of these small-businesses even get drawn into our Nomad operations, supplying us with tools, fixing our cars, and operating transportation services to our camps. We already have a handful of guides who have saved up and purchased second and third safari vehicles, and during peak season when things get really busy, our guides are the first to be called upon for extra cars!