A community forestry approach was adopted by Cameroon as a strategy to promote the sustainable management of forests, participation by local communities in forest management, and poverty alleviation. However, results have been moderate and community forestry has largely failed in achieving its initial goals. Our work, based on existing literature, uses the three interrelated dimensions of equity: distributive, procedural, and contextual to highlight the main equity challenges encountered in implementing the community forestry approach over the past 20 years in Cameroon. The main constraints to distributive equity identified include: the absence of clear benefit-sharing mechanisms and rents capture by elites, insecure tenure, and limited use rights of forest resources. Regarding the procedural dimension, we observed an exclusion of vulnerable groups, especially women, and a lack of information flow and transparency in decision-making processes. Finally, for contextual equity, the main constraints are unfair laws and regulations that give more advantages to the state and logging companies than to the local population. Moreover, poor community capacities and high transaction costs in the process of obtaining and exploiting community forests are additional constraints to contextual equity. The authors recommend a few measures to improve community forestry contribution to socioeconomic development, equity in benefit sharing, and sustainable management of forest resources. These include the need: (1) to promote transparency in community forests management with fair and gender-based policies that consider socioeconomic differences existing within and between forest communities; (2) to strengthen local community members financial and technical capacities and increase their representation and participation in decision-making structures; and (3) to set up mechanisms that guarantee existing policies are fully implemented.
Rural Resources Centres (RRCs) managed by community-based organisations, where farmers come together for training and demonstration, have been an innovative extension approach in Cameroon since 2006. This paper describes information flow in RRCs and farmers’ assessment of RRCs as information sources. All the RRCs in Cameroon were studied and 29 group interviews, involving 118 producers and 7 individual interviews with RRC managers, were performed. RRCs share information with several stakeholders including farmers, research institutions, and educational and religious institutions; and interpersonal channels are commonly used. Farmers and agricultural extension workers are the most important sources of information for RRCs. Farmers rank RRCs as their second best sources of information after fellow farmers. On average, each year, RRCs organise at least 40 training sessions for about 1777 participants. The themes are mainly agroforestry (29%), marketing (20%), group dynamics (20%) and post-harvest techniques (11%). The issue of funding the activities of the RRCs needs to be addressed, they need to be better structured, and their human resources increased and strengthened.
In Africa, cocoa yields are low, partly due to soil fertility constraints and poor management. While peoples’ knowledge, aspirations, and abilities are key factors explaining their behaviour, little is known about the rationales that underpin soil fertility management practices (SFMPs) of cocoa farmers. To address this gap, we conducted an exploratory survey in two contrasting regions in Cameroon where cocoa is an important crop: the humid forest and the forest-savannah transition zone. Some 30% of farmers in the transition zone as opposed to 13% in the humid forest expressed concerns about soil fertility. The most relevant soil fertility indicators for farmers were high cocoa yield, dark soil colour, ease of tillage, and floral composition. To enhance and maintain soil fertility, farmers used residues from weeding (100%), planting of trees (42%), mineral fertilisers (33%), compost (16%), and manure (13%). More farmers in the transition zone than the humid forest implemented SFMPs. Our findings suggest that soil fertility perceptions, access to inputs, local practices, and experience influence farmers’ use of SFMPs. The limited use of mineral fertilisers was explained by poor access whereas the use of organic fertilisers and tree planting were mostly constrained by lack of labour and knowledge. Farmers prioritised practices to increase yield and viewed SFMPs to be the least important management practices, although they believe high cocoa yield is an important indicator of soil fertility. To foster sustainable cocoa intensification, it is necessary to enhance farmers’ knowledge on SFMPs, increase access to inputs, and ensure returns on investment while considering farmers’ priorities and practices.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.