The new breed of “community lodges” popping up in Africa’s safari hot-spots make a very attractive promise — that your conscience can be as clear as the ice cubes in your G&T. Here, local tribespeople don’t just sweep your room, they own and run the lodge itself. And the profits go to building schools and clinics, not just lining foreign pockets.

These lodges might be run on ethical lines, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have camp beds and leaky roofs. Many are among the swankiest on the continent, with the finest guides in the business ensuring your trip’s flooded with fauna.

Here we round up the best of the new breed — luxury lodges and remote bush camps where flashing the plastic and knocking back those sundowners counts as responsible tourism.

Prices are per person and include all meals, transfers, game-viewing activities and flights from London; contact the operator for regional departures

LAKE MANYARA TREE LODGE
Tanzania

The only lodge inside Lake Manyara National Park, Tree Lodge looks like something Tarzan would have built had he won the lottery and trained with Richard Rogers.

Good for you: cradled in the boughs of a mahogany forest at the edge of the Rift Valley escarpment, these are awfully posh tree houses with cotton linens draped over vast handcrafted beds that wouldn’t look out of place in a sultan’s seraglio.

Made from local timber and makuti palms, the 10 tree-house cottages each have floor-to- ceiling windows and verandas from which you can reach out and touch the canopy.

Just 125 square miles in area, Lake Manyara National Park isn’t big, but its diverse landscape (lush forest, open floodplains and acacia scrub) just drips with wildlife, most famously the tree-climbing lions, as well as the rest of the Big Five (elephant, rhino, leopard and buffalo) and more than 400 species of bird. Backed by the 2,000ft rock walls of the Rift Valley escarpment, the lakeshore is pink with flamingos.

Good for Africa: more than £15,000 of profits has been invested in local projects, including a 10-bed clinic, Aids education, school classrooms, scholarships and teachers’ houses. Check out www.lakemanyara.com.

Sample package: from £2,175 for four nights at Lake Manyara Tree Lodge and three at Chumbe Island Lodge, an ecoresort on a marine reserve near Zanzibar, including flights with Kenya Airways via Nairobi to Arusha, back from Zanzibar. Contact Discovery Initiatives (01285 643333, www.discoveryinitiatives.com).

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