Let’s take a view of a tourist, what do we need when we plan for our touristic visits? Places to visit, things to do, good food to enjoy, places to stay, to list a few. For travelers with disabilities, accessibility is the required feature that cuts across all things. Barriers to accessibility are not only physical, but there are also other types of barriers, including communication, attitudinal, and institutional barriers. Therefore, the portfolio must tackle the issue from multiple fronts and at multiple levels.  When I first learnt about system thinking, I thought of it in a very structural sense: components in the system interacting and influencing one another. Yet, as I worked on developing inclusive tourism, I started to feel very differently and found system thinking to be much more ‘organic’. For me, it is about understanding the lived experience of people involved in the system. Their pain points direct us to explore factors and interlinkages that construct the system. If we follow the trail of pain points in the human experience without limiting ourselves in a silo, we will see an interconnected picture and hints of what the portfolio of solutions needs to look like. Problems that travelers with disabilities face are connected to the inability of service providers, public and private, to offer inclusive services. That inability is connected to many other factors. Some service providers are eager to change, but they too have their pain points – from the lack of knowledge and capabilities to limited financial capital, institutional setup, and deeply rooted divisive mindset, etc.  In a way, growing a portfolio is like nurturing a garden. We need to plant diverse seeds that correspond with different needs in the space, and all of them affect one another. Our interventions need to be multi-level like how we design our garden with different layers of plants. Like grass and shrubs, we need practical local actions that yield concrete results and inspire further actions. At the same time, we also need policy work to create an enabling environment for scaling at the national level, like we need to plant perennial trees that take time to grow but will shelter us in the long run. One last thing about this garden analogy is that it reminds us to do our development work with care and empathy for the human actors in the seemingly abstract system, just like we nurture lives in our garden. With that, we should have a chance at transforming the system for a sustainable and inclusive future.  

We connect diverse partners at the provincial level e.g. relevant governmental agencies, association of people with disabilities, and local entrepreneurs so they are able to carry on the development.