Celebrate Mandela's birthday with a Volunteer holiday in Africa

Help celebrate Nelson Mandela’s 90th year with Hands Up Holidays the operator blending travel with meaningful volunteering experiences, by sampling a voluntourism holiday in Africa.

The three projects highlighted below help AIDS victims and work towards Making Poverty History, projects closely associated with Nelson Mandela:

• SOUTH AFRICA, Cape Town: 7- & 9-day trip
• BOTSWANA, ZAMBIA & NAMIBIA – a luxury 15-day itinerary
• MOZAMBIQUE : 12-day bush and reef trip

SOUTH AFRICA: The volunteering element of both the 7- and 9-day “Cape Classic” itinerary involves helping with repairs and renovations at an AIDS orphanage in a township near Cape Town. Holiday highlights include a cable car ride to the top of Table Mountain, a kayak trip to view a penguin colony and an excursion to South Africa’s famous wine-growing region around Stellenbosch. Prices start from £1,150 per person (excluding international flight costs). Participants can also visit Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was a prisoner for 18 years. Next departure dates are 18 August, 20 September and 20 December.

BOTSWANA, ZAMBIA & NAMIBIA: The 15-day “Delta, Falls and Game Parks” trip provides luxury accommodation and memorable wildlife spotting in Botswana’s Okavango Delta in Botswana through unforgettable game drives and bush walks, not to mention staying at the spectacular Victoria Falls for two nights.

The volunteering project is in East Caprivi, Namibia, and aims to provide alternative livelihoods for local people through the construction and maintenance of community campsites as a source of sustainable income. The trip ends with a flight in a private plane to Okonjima, home of the AfriCats conservation foundation. Prices start from £7,600, excluding international flights.

MOZAMBIQUE: An itinerary that also doubles as a meaningful volunteering honeymoon comes in the form of “Bush and Reef”, a 12-day itinerary whose base is at Guludo, a tropical barefoot paradise on a deserted, powder-white beach. Here visitors can sail, swim, snorkel and dive in clear, turquoise waters, or go bush walking to spot elephants. Volunteering projects range from helping to build a playground in a neighbouring school to monitoring humpback whales and surveying the coral reef in conjunction with resident marine biologists. Prices start from £2,350, excluding international flights. Next departure dates are 9 and 30 August, 13 September, 11 October and 1 November.

Prices include most meals, accommodation, internal transfers, park entrance fees and guiding but exclude international air fares.

In addition to the examples highlighted, Hands Up Holidays offers a wide range of volunteering experiences throughout Africa in Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Uganda.

They include:

- building washing facilities for children orphaned by the AIDS pandemic gripping MALAWI
- helping to raise awareness of AIDS/HIV in schools in GHANA by distributing pamphlets and participating in presentations and seminars
- helping to build houses, classrooms and medical staff quarters near Victoria Falls, ZAMBIA, in an area that has been decimated by AIDS, or teach skills such as carpentry or needlework, or history, geography or sports
- working alongside the OvaHimba people in a remote area of north western NAMIBIA to build traditional homesteads, fix water wells or help tend cattle
- helping to build a library, reading room and IT room in an impoverished Berber community in MOROCCO

For more information, log on to Handsupholidays.com.