In most rural communities in Cameroon, livelihood sustainability is to a large extent dependent on the effective and inclusive management of the natural resources. This is especially the case of community commons like watersheds, forests, and arable lands.
In situations of multiple shocks, most community members tend to negative coping mechanisms while undermining environmental protection and climate change mitigation in their dire struggle for household food needs and income generation.
These negative coping mechanisms tend to appeal in the short term, but they only further expose the communities to environmental shocks like soil degradation, water pollution, constant floods and loss of habitation.
These combined with top-down-inappropriate state policies or lack of effective implementation and monitoring of well-meaning state policies turn to increase hardship while escalating unequal strives for environmental assets which state policies seek to protect in this era of climate change mitigation and adaptation.
In most cases, negative livelihood coping mechanisms and strategies tend to adopted by rural women and girls because in most situations, they have no formal access to alternative livelihoods skills, assets, and supportive policy frameworks, yet, at the community and household level, they are culturally attributed the responsibility to ensure household food supply, water and fuel wood just to name a few.
At RuWCED, we believe that, it takes more than awareness raising and sensitisations to reverse the pattern. providing rural women and girls with alternative environmentally friendly livelihood skills and resources combined with inclusive and supportive regulatory frameworks is a first step in the right direction of working with rural women and girls towards climate change mitigation.
Ongoing Projects:
Training internally displaced women on sustainable watershed management and the production of cleaner cooking stoves in Bamenda Cameroon.
In this project, RuWCED is working to set up a clean stove production training center and train 50 IDPs/community women/girls who are currently adopting climate unfriendly livelihood coping strategies of watershed tree cutting/charcoal production to gain skills in climate friendly livelihoods, while also engaging the community in sustainable watershed agro-forest reforestation.