Cameroon

Population

people

Country size

hectares

Forest cover

hectares

overview

Approximately 40 percent of Cameroon is forested. Yet more than three million hectares of Cameroon’s forests have been cleared since 1990 – an area approximately the size of Belgium.

The forest here is under intense pressure from logging, mining, agribusiness and associated infrastructure development. In addition to their environmental destruction, these investments have failed to foster any meaningful local development.

Forest peoples have very limited ways to secure lands they depend on, and the community forest model in the country is not well-adapted to their needs. Indigenous peoples also suffer additional rights violations because of widespread discrimination against them.

Our Impacts

With our partners, we have brought about unprecedented legal action against wrongdoing by logging companies, using our ForestLink system.

We have enabled indigenous communities to map their traditional lands and contest the impacts of agro-industrial expansion.

Our participatory land use planning approach has been hailed as a model to be reproduced at national scale.

With our support, our partners raised vital awareness about Covid-19 among isolated indigenous communities - and they did it with music!

APIFED's team equipped with soap, buckets with taps, disinfectant gel, masks, and posters in the local languages Baka and Bulu to distribute to communities

Projects & Campaigns

ForestLink

Real-time community-based monitoring is a tool that connects local people with national law enforcement in an effort to stop illegal logging and deforestation.

Conservation & Human Rights

The traditional ‘fortress conservation’ approach of the west is premised on the dangerous yet persistent idea that local people need to be separated from nature to keep it “pristine” (sometimes for the benefit of foreign tourists). This does not only drive human rights violations but is also ineffective as it ignores and alienates the very people who have shaped and stewarded those landscapes for millennia.

Mapping for Rights

Mapping For Rights is an award-winning, interactive community map project for the Congo Basin, which started in November 2011 and is ongoing.

Agribusiness

Commercial agriculture projects have been associated with forceful displacement from their ancestral lands, protracted land conflicts, loss of livelihoods with little or no compensation, disregard for their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), as well as water and soil pollution.