Investment plays an important role in the economic development of nations. Building a sustainable and thriving tourism industry necessitates well-informed and strategic investments. Recent perspectives emphasise tourism as an investment choice capable of breaking the cycle of poverty. Socioeconomic development and informal savings schemes like stokvels have emerged as practical mechanisms that play a bigger role than formal financing in Africa’s income mobilisation, which contributes to the social transformation of the tourism sector. This paper investigates whether the concept of tourism stokvel investment can effectively contribute to this social transformation in an African context. The term ‘tourism stokvel investment’ has not been previously documented in existing literature and is not known within the established stokvel typology. A quantitative study, using a constructivist research approach, theoretically investigated tourism stokvel investment through three dimensions (trust, social development, and financial security) and yielded 202 responses between March and May 2021. Exploratory Factor Analysis and Principal Component Analyses examined 10 items resulting in a one-factor solution. Tourism Stokvel Investment is validated as a novel construct, representing a unique contribution to the existing body of knowledge. These findings are of value to tourism destination managers who seek alternative methods of investment in tourism.