Winner of Human Rights In Tourism Award

When the Studienkreis für Tourismus und Entwicklung presented SASANE Sisterhood with the 2023 TO DO Award for Human Rights in Tourism at ITB Berlin, it affirmed a model that places human dignity at the centre of every itinerary. The TO DO Award honours tourism that respects and strengthens human rights, and SASANE earned it for one of the most direct expressions of that idea anywhere in the world: a travel operator whose journeys are led by survivors of human trafficking, domestic violence and child marriage — and whose income funds bringing more women out of exploitation and into tourism.

The survivors who work with SASANE come from Nepal's rural mountain villages and from marginalised communities living with severe economic and social constraints. For many, trafficking and gender-based violence were not distant risks but lived realities. SASANE's response is to break that chain — not through charity alone, but through skilled, dignified, fairly paid work in tourism. Women are trained as professional trekking guides, equipped to lead visitors through the same mountain villages they call home.

What distinguishes SASANE as a women-empowerment travel operator is how its trips are built. Before designing a travel package, the organisation conducts systematic interviews and surveys with local community representatives, learning what each community needs and wants from tourism. The result is travel shaped by the people who host it, rather than imposed upon them — an approach that keeps benefits local, protects culture, and ensures that visitors arrive as guests, not as a disruption.

This community-first method is also what makes SASANE's human-rights credentials real rather than rhetorical. Its guides are survivors who understand vulnerability from the inside, and the experiences they design are intended to reduce it: every booking strengthens the economic independence of women who were once at the mercy of traffickers, and helps dismantle the conditions in which exploitation thrives.

The 2023 TO DO Award placed SASANE among a select group of global initiatives recognised for putting people first in tourism. For a grassroots, survivor-led enterprise from Nepal, that recognition on the world's largest travel stage is significant — proof that a small operator in the Himalayas can set an international example for what ethical, human-rights-based travel looks like.

For travellers, the meaning is simple. A trek with SASANE is led by a woman who has reclaimed her future, designed with the community that welcomes you, and built so that your journey leaves Nepal stronger than it found it. It is tourism as the TO DO Award intends it — a force that defends human rights rather than testing them.