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Pedrina Mamani turns her head to the side and curls it down, close to her shoulder, smiling shyly without looking anybody in the eye. With a slight nod of the head, she indicates her acceptance. She only has one condition: that it be taken against a background of flowers.

Pedrina has just been asked to have her photograph taken and to give an interview about the effect of tourism on her community, Unocolla, an association of rural handicraft producers situated about half an hour away from Lake Titicaca, in the south-east of Peru near the Bolivian border.

Over the past few years her community has been developing a tourism venture that offers people from the far corners of the Earth the opportunity to come and stay in the community and see the effect of fair trade in Peru. The venture is being developed together with several other rural communities in the Peruvian Andes that form part of Minka Fair Trade.

MINKA, which in Quechua means "working together for the mutual benefit of all", has been a part of the lives of artisans from Unocolla and a number other handicraft communities in the region for over 25 years. The organisation, created in 1978 to provide social and economic development for local handicraft producers, is a means by which producers like those in Pedrina's community can connect themselves to international fair trade markets.

But regardless of the work that the artisans have achieved through MINKA, the income derived through fair trade is, by itself, seldom enough to feed their families. To supplement their families' income, therefore, the men of the communities are often forced to leave in search of work in nearby towns and mines, leaving women like Pedrina at home to look after the house, raise the children and continue the handicraft production.

With the introduction of tourism into the communities, this is changing. The tourism venture provides income in three main ways: through payments for hospitality services (such as meals, accommodation, guides, activities and transport), through direct sales of handicrafts to tourists and through donations from tourist groups. The purposes for which the donations are used are decided in a democratic way, with an emphasis on improving facilities and infrastructure in the communities.

This new income is having the additional benefit of keeping producer families together for longer periods of the year.  And, as you can read in An Interview with Pedrina Mamani, this is one of the reasons why the residents of Unocolla are viewing the tourism project in a very positive way.