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Africa is the only continent on which poverty has increased in 20 years, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Within this context, working to bring hope and a better life to mankind, created in the image and likeness of God, is a task that the Gospel, which sets free from bondage, imposes on us.
According to the Christian view, which CIPCRE upholds, fighting against poverty can only be done through a global and sustainable development approach, that is, one that does not oppose man to his environment, but which integrates all dimensions of the ecological process.
It is in this light that CIPCRE today accompanies, nine unions of farmer organisations, five dater Common Initiative Groups (GICs) and 4 handicraft with the aim of increasing their income, and also in order to harmoniously integrate ecology in their daily work. That is why CIPCRE has put into place a strategy of participatory approach, which emphasizes sensitization, information and support for projects initiated and conducted by the partners themselves.
 Integrating Agriculture and Animal Breeding
In the North-West Province of Cameroon, where demographic pressure causes a intense soil degradation, and that sometimes leads to bloody conflicts between farmers and stock breeders over space, CIPCRE promotes an agricultural practice invented by farmers from Babanki called “Night Paddock Manuring Farming System” (NPMFS). It consists of keeping cows on a plot by night, enriching it with faeces and urine. Once the plot has received enough waste, the animals are withdrawn and the land left for a month so that the decomposition process can take place. The land is then ploughed and seeds planted. Such a fertilized plot can be cultivated and will give good result without the use of any other dressing of manure for four or five years. After that, the process can be renewed. Because CIPCRE has improved or brought necessary innovations, the NPMFS is today intensively practiced in villages such as Babanki Tungo, Kedjom Ketinguh, Biame and beyond. It helps not only to restore the fertility of soils at lower cost and increase production, but also to resolve conflicts between farmers and breeders. |
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Reforestation to Improve the Soil
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In order to cope with ambient poverty, farmers from the mountainous regions of Cameroon (West and North-West Provinces) have developed strategies, which unfortunately have fostered the degradation of the environment, resulting in increased deforestation, the disappearance of the vegetal cover and the destruction of the arable soil. It is to solve these problems of ecological imbalance, the decrease of agricultural production as well as of land conflicts, which are sometimes violent, that CIPCRE decided to support communities and individuals with forestation projects. The results are perceptible. At the level of field activities, two pilot seedbeds and five village seedbeds have been created and they are producing an average of 30.000 plants per year; three plots of community reforestation have been created with an forestation rhythm of four hectares per year. Cultivated species are diversified and are essentially local and exotic species. These encouraging results reinforce the restoration and the protection of soils, improving in this way agricultural productivity as well as the living conditions of the populations.
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Medicinal plants to treat man and nature
| In most African countries, in towns as in the countryside, there is a passion for natural medicine - whether through necessity or cultural practice. Initially put in place as strategy for the gathering of farmers, the promotion of medicinal plants by CIPCRE today has three objectives: to promote the conservation of biodiversity by cultivating endangered local species, to contribute in improving the health of grassroots partners and to improve indigenous know-how on natural medicine. It has today become common to find spaces reserved for the cultivation of medicinal plants around the houses of our rural partners. There are about a hundred in the West and North-West regions of Cameroon. In order to support the sensitization and accompanying trainings, CIPCRE has produced two booklets whose demand is on the increase: “Do you know the medicinal plants?” and «How to cultivate medicinal |
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Compost against social exclusion
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The accumulation of open air domestic waste in African cities is becoming a permanent threat and a source of death for man and nature. in this respect, CIPCRE has set up a project of composting as an effective and adequate means of elimination refuse and enriching of the soil in the town of Bafoussam of Cameroon. From its beginnings, this project was assigned another objective, that to fight against the social exclusion of young people. Thus today, several tens of young people organized around five decentralized sites, live from the work of collecting, sorting and composting domestic waste. As result, approximately ten tones of refuse out of the eighty produced in Bafoussam are collected and transformed into compost daily. Nearly 50.000 bags of compost were already sold and used in farms in Cameroon. The populations are more and more aware on the value and importance of household refuse for the fertilization of fields.
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Integrated Handicraft in the Management of the Environment
| Because of the economic crisis which has affected Benin for several years, many unemployed young people took refuge in cities, getting, in particular, into the handicraft sector. An important fringe of those, in fact is today in the intersection between handicraft and ecology: they are the collection craftsmen. Because of its specificity, CIPCRE is particularly interested in this target group with an aim of reinforcing and amplifying a positive ecological attitude: the recovery and recycling of solid wasted. This is the Promotion of Artisan Technologies Integrated into the Environmental Management Project in Benin called “PROTAIGE-Benin”. Principal recipients include blacksmiths, tinkers and founders. The project has three axes: the organization of trade associations; environmental and civic education and promotion of gender equity. The impact of the work of CIPCRE appears amongst other things in the improvement of hygiene during workshops, the improvement of the trained recipients’ production and the increased sensitization on the use of dangerous products as well as non biodegradable plastic sachets. |
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