We consider KiliGATE a social enterprise—half way between a charity and a full for-profit company. This means that we have s social purpose but at the same time need to generate enough revenues to ensure the sustainability of our operations.
On the other hand, we believe that for-profit companies are better suited than charities to create lasting impact. We have very ambitious plans to grow and expand our services and offering in order to accelerate and maximize our impact. To fund our expansion, we are looking for social impact investors who can help us achieve our mission. We believe that our mission and purpose will appeal to them, but we need to be able to offer them a fair return for their investment. Therefore, we need to implement a sustainable revenue-generating business model.
Social purpose
On the one hand, we seek to maximize our social impact and contribution to society at large, rather than our profits or shareholder value creation. We measure our success predominantly by the social impact we achieve. All our actions are assessed by whether they would make the world a better place.
If we were to make a lot of money, but then realize that we contributed to more pollution, destruction of local habitat, or exploitation of human labor—rather than sustainable local development, protection of cultural or natural sites, or global integration—we would consider KiliGATE a huge failure. Unfortunately, those negative side effects of tourism are all too commonplace.
However, we strongly believe that responsible tourism, if done in a sustainable way, has an important role to play in making our world a better place for all of us. This is our most fundamental motivation and raison d’être.