Seven-year-old Kundhana Karanam Kumar has never seen mountain gorillas, or any of the other three gorilla types in real life.

But the Primary Two student at the upscale La Colombiére School in Kigali has to wait eight years before she can go to see these endangered species at their home in the Volcanoes National Park in northern Rwanda. The required age for this rare opportunity is 15 years.

She, however, did not have to wait for the rare chance — reserved for foreign celebrities or high profile Rwandans — to name a baby gorilla at the highly billed annual naming ceremony called Kwita Izina in Kinyarwanda. It is Rwanda’s signature conservation event not only for the primates but the environment at large.

On June 16, Kundhana lined up alongside two distinguished professors from Japan and Germany, several top Rwandan business executives and distinguished government officials to name 19 newborns at the 8th edition of Kwita Izina, bringing to 141 the total number of babies named since the event began in 2005.

She claimed her place as the youngest person to name gorillas because she had won a gorilla painting competition that Rwanda’s Development Board, the conveners of Kwita Izina, had organised to engage young children with the country’s leading natural resource. She sketched her impressions from pictures of gorillas her father had taken some years ago.

READ: Kwita Izina 2012 celebrates 19 baby gorillas, among them rare twins
As to actually visiting with the gorillas, Kundhana will have to hope that by the time she comes of age, her family can make the ultimate sacrifice to meet the trekking fee.

In the past eight years, the price has been revised thrice: first in 2004 from $250 to $357; then in 2006 to $500; and this year to $750. 

Rwandan tour operators have, of course, complained that the latest trekking fee is prohibitive and makes Rwanda an expensive destination relative to, say, Uganda, where it’s safe to visit gorillas and the cost is still $500.

DR Congo, the third country in the world with mountain gorillas, is off limits due to perpetual insecurity, which has made gorilla conservation a difficult job.

Unfortunately for the operators, statistics don’t support their complaints. The number of gorilla trekkers has grown throughout the past decade. 

This growth slackened in 2009 by a few hundred people but the visitor numbers rebounded in their thousands both in 2010 and last year.

Rwanda, in turn, earned $9 million specifically from permit sales and an overall total of $252 million from tourism — a good percentage of these revenues related directly to gorilla tourism — making this sector its top export.

Rwanda is focused exclusively on high end ecotourism in place of mass tourism and nothing better illustrates this than the gorilla trekking fees.

Rica Rwigamba, the head of tourism at RDB, says the strategy has served the country well so far and the fees are dictated by the market because gorilla trekking is a “unique experience.”

“If you cannot increase to increase the number of mountain gorillas without affecting their normal lives, the only thing you can work on is the demand,” Rwigamba told The EastAfrican.

PR campaigns

Rwanda has turned round the perception of being an unsafe destination by commissioning aggressive public relations campaigns in Europe and North America; got itself into over 350 international media outlets; participated in nearly every tourism fair; and funded familiarisation tours to Rwanda. 

It now has nearly 70 per cent of gorillas living in the Virunga ranges. This has helped it guarantee value for money for trekkers since they’re sure to see them, says Rwigamba.

Yet Rwanda’s conservation masterstroke is an unlikely one: Since 2005, it has disbursed five per cent of tourism revenues every year — a total of Rwf1.4 billion ($2.3 million), according to Rwigamba — to communities around national parks as a visible demonstration of tourism’s usefulness to people who pose immediate threats to gorillas.

These monies have funded a spectrum of projects both communal and personal like schools, water tanks and health centres, tree planting, basket weaving, potato, mushroom and pepper farming and contributed directly to poverty reduction, according to Aime Bosenibamwe, the governor of the Northern Province. 

Rwanda lifted at least a million people out of poverty last year, according to its third Household Living Conditions Survey released in April 2012, with Musanze district, the home of the gorillas, outperforming all but two districts within Kigali City.

In as much as gorilla tourism has changed Rwanda’s fortunes, the financial crisis in Europe and North America has brought with it the need to diversify not just in terms of products but markets as  well.

According to Rwigamba, they are now focusing on the Asian market, which hasn’t been as affected financially, as they bolster cultural tourism, the number two strategy in the country’s sustainable tourism master plan.