Scrubbing Toilets, Building Futures: A Woman-Led Tourism Revolution In Rural Bali
In 2012, I watched a group of children get chased off a public beach in Bali by a villa’s security guard. They were Balinese kids, on their own ancestral land, told they were “disturbing” tourists. That moment changed my life. When I investigated further, the reality was worse than I imagined: around 85% of the farmland along my village’s coastline in Kelecung, Tabanan, had already been bought up by investors.
Research on tourism and land grabbing in Bali confirms this is not an isolated case. Across the island, nearly 25% of agricultural land has been lost in the past two decades, displacing communities whose livelihoods depend on it. Kelecung, a hamlet of just 144 families, was next in line. I could not stand by.
In 2015, I left a stable career in the city and returned to my village with a vision: to build community-based tourism that would give people an economic alternative to selling their land. Not tourism that extracts from the community, but tourism that is the community.
The beginning was brutal. As a woman proposing change in a deeply patriarchal village, I faced rejection from roughly 95% of the community and, even worse, a death threat. I started by teaching English to the village children voluntarily. Slowly, their parents’ suspicion of a hidden agenda I brought softened. I then approached two families, went to their homes, and scrubbed their toilets with my own hands to show them hospitality standards. I listed their rooms on Airbnb, invited my former students from Surabaya as the first guests, and paid for everything from my personal savings.
That small experiment worked. The families earned real income. Others began to pay attention.
Today, Kelecung Eco Village operates 15 homestays with 30 rooms, all managed by local families. We host over 50 student groups per year from Japan and Taiwan, alongside individual travelers and digital nomads.
We offer edu-ecotourism experiences: turtle conservation, regenerative agroforestry, traditional Balinese dance and gamelan, wellness treatments, and soft-adventure activities. Everything operates on an “on-supply” basis, meaning tourism is integrated into the daily rhythm of village life rather than built on top of it.
Each homestay is a real Balinese family home, not a resort room. Guests sleep in traditional pavilions of carved wood and woven bamboo, share meals with the family, and wake to the rhythm of village life.
What makes our model distinctive is not just what we do, but how the money flows. All tourism revenue enters a single communal account and is then distributed directly to participating families, the women’s catering group, youth guides, cultural performers, and daily workers based on their actual involvement. This is recorded in a financial ledger and reviewed collectively during monthly community meetings.
There is no intermediary, and very little leakage. The impact has been transformative. Twenty-five women who previously had no personal income now earn IDR 200,000–300,000 per day through catering, massage, cooking classes, and tending our communal forest. Monthly, they could earn at least IDR 1,000,000, more than half of their family’s previous income, money they had never earned before as a woman. Ten youth work as tour guides and drivers.
In 2024, a group of young villagers independently launched a collective souvenir business, funded entirely with their own capital. This matters deeply: in the past, 75% of local youth chose to leave for city jobs. Now, they are building their future at home. In total, operating in a hamlet of just 144 families, our tourism activities now directly benefit around 40 people, and approximately 80% of the population feels the economic impact, up from just 2 families when we started in 2016.
Twenty-five women earning their first independent income, ten youth choosing to stay rather than migrate, and 80% of a 144-families hamlet now feeling the economic impact of tourism, up from just 2 families in 2016.
My own role in all of this has been to lead, and to lead specifically through the women. I approached the wives of the first two families myself and trained them in hospitality, cooking, and guest care, women who had never held a personal income of their own. I built the women's catering group and the communal account as deliberate structures, so that participation and payment would never depend on any single man's goodwill.
Today around twenty-five women work in catering, traditional massage, cooking classes, and tending our forest, and most of the people who plant and care for the communal forest are women and youth. I set up the distribution system that keeps this fair, and I lead the review with the community every month. Leading this change as a woman in a village where patriarchy still runs deep remains the hardest and the most important part of my work.
Through a grant from Women Earth Alliance, we established a communal forest with over 1,000 trees across 375 plant species, using the Miyawaki rapid-growth technique with a 95% survival rate, designed to offset the carbon footprint of visitors and move our tourism activities toward climate neutrality. We also support a grassroots turtle conservation program that has released over 30,000 hatchlings since 2007.
A communal forest of over 1,000 trees across 375 plant species with a 95% survival rate for tourism decarbonization and a grassroots turtle conservation program that has released over 30,000 hatchlings since 2007, all integrated into the village's tourism model.
Our co-working space was built entirely from local materials: river stones, bamboo, beach sand, and reclaimed wood. Recognition has followed, and the model has kept growing. In 2024, Indonesia's Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy designated Kelecung as a national Pilot Project for Women-Friendly and Environmentally Conscious Tourism Villages, intended as a replicable model. In 2025, Mark Plus Tourism and the Bali Tourism Board named Kelecung the Most Bali Impact-Tourism Village, together with three category awards for People-Centric, Green, and Partnership Excellence villages.
As of 2026, the village runs steadily, receiving more than twenty guests a month and hosting around two educational group visits a month, while I complete facilitator training with Women Earth Alliance and a trainer program on green tourism for small enterprises run by the Ministry of Tourism with the ILO, so that I can help other villages follow the same path.
Even through the post-pandemic years, when rising costs and renewed investor pressure pushed more coastal land toward sale elsewhere, our community has held its ground, and some families have even begun buying their farmland back. I have since been invited to speak at TEDxTabanan, Earth Company, and government policy forums on rural tourism governance and gender inclusivity.
The lesson I want to share is simple: we do not need investors or government directives to start. We need conviction, patience, and a willingness tobegin with what we have, even if that means scrubbing someone else’s toilet. Responsible tourism is not a certification or a label.
It is a daily choice to make sure that the people who share their home with visitors are the ones who benefit from it. Kelecung is proof that a small village can resist the tide of displacement, not by fighting development, but by building a better kind of it.
