Travel forward. Give back.
We partner with woman-owned, woman-run and/or woman-led businesses in order to make a meaningful contribution to furthering their economic security.
Our travels also support local organisations that combat violence against women and girls. We make a financial contribution funded through a percentage of the trip cost and a matching percentage of Sororal’s profits.
Through this dual practice, our travels do more than provide an opportunity to learn, replenish, and explore. We help bring gender-based violence issues to the forefront, promote gender equality and women’s empowerment, and encourage countries to mainstream gender issues in their respective tourism policies.
We are guided by UN SDG # 5
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are an urgent call to action by all countries to work in the global partnership for peace and prosperity for people and our planet. We know such major international commitments can seem lofty or overwhelming at times, but these 17 goals lay out the blueprint for what needs to be done in order to make our world more equitable and sustainable for all, now and in the future. We never shy away from a challenge at Sororal and, in that spirit, have built our business model with the Fifth Sustainable Development Goal – achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls – at its core.
Why? We believe in a wide-angle view of sustainability that includes a focus on gender equality, racial and social equity and cultural considerations alongside the environment and climate change. Without the full participation of all members of society, we cannot hope to make any industry – including travel and tourism – sustainable for future generations. Our focus is specifically on gender equality because we are passionate advocates for the right of women and girls to live independent, autonomous lives free from violence and believe that the manifestation of these rights is crucial to our global well-being.
The statistics remain alarming: at the current rate of progress, the UN estimates that it will take up to 286 years to close gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments. We know that we cannot do it all, but we are strong believers in the power in doing what we can. Sororal focuses our work in the travel industry because we know that over half of the jobs in this sector are held by women and that it supports twice as many women employers as other sectors. The UN World Tourism Organization has reported that the travel & tourism sector provides women with more opportunity for empowerment than other sectors, and we’re here to support it by building trips that champion women-owned or led businesses and grassroots women’s organizations that fight violence against women and girls.
The uncomfortable truth about violence against women…
Violence against women and girls remains a human rights issue all over the world, reaching pandemic proportions. UN Women reports that 1 in 3 women have experienced physical or sexual violence, mostly by an intimate partner, and that worldwide, almost 3 in 5 women killed were killed by their partners or family. Further, recent data collected to track the progress of UN SDG #5 showed that 60% of the countries failed to have laws defining rape based on the principle of consent, only 56% of married or in-union women aged 15 to 49 make their own decisions regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights, and one in five young women worldwide were married in childhood in 2022.
We also know that intimate partner and family violence is not a someone-else, somewhere-else issue: approximately every 6 days, a woman in Canada is killed by her partner. Last year, there were 52 femicides in 52 weeks in the province of Ontario alone.
Sororal was born out of a passion for travel – yes! – but also as a tool for advocacy in the fight to end violence against women, by shining a light on the magnitude of the issue and using our collective travel dollars to support the grassroots organizations working tirelessly to effect change in their own communities. We chose this issue because of its insidious prevalence no matter where we travel and, of course, out of our own personal experiences. We all know a woman who has experienced violence, in one or more of its many forms, by virtue of her gender.
We are thrilled to highlight and share the work of our nonprofit partners Casa Luz in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Usikimye in Nairobi, Kenya.
Read our Travel notes
We don’t just feel passionately about issues related to travel, gender equality and violence against women, we write about them too!
Take a deeper dive on the big questions of today and check out our Travel Notes.
