NGOs partner to support pygmy community

The Foundation for Development and Environment in Cameroon, FEDEC, has partnered with the International Support Centre for Sustainable Development, CIAD to improve the living conditions of the pygmy population living along the corridor of the Cameroon-Chad Pipeline in the East Region.

FEDEC and CIAD signed a collaboration agreement in Yaounde on April 2, 2015 with the aim of enabling vulnerable population to access income-generating activities with the focus on agriculture.

The beneficiary communities are the Bakola and Bagyeli indigens. The agreement stresses that the CIAD will work to improve food security as well as increase the revenues of the two communities by distributing agricultural tools with high-yielding seeds.

It will structure the community into groups so as to better orientate them on income-generating activities. Leaders from both communities will receive training on techniques of elementary agriculture. They will from there train the people on farming techniques worth engendering revenue.

The Board Chairman of the FEDEC, Alfred Bagueka Assobo expressed government’s commitment to improve the livelihood of the population living along the corridor of the Cameroon-Chad pipeline.

If government created FEDEC in 2001 to oversee that projects along the corridor added value to the livelihood of the population, it was because it has the vulnerable population at heart and counts them among the movers and shakers of the country’s culture and conservation of biodiversity.

The Director General of FEDEC, Agnes Virginie Edoa was satisfied with the increase of literacy rate in the area from 30 per cent in 1997 to 47 per cent currently.

He also praised the adherence of the pygmy people to modern health services, land reforms as well as citizenship. Like Alfred Bagueka Assobo, Agnes Virginie Edoa challenged the Bertoua-based NGO, CIAD to show proof of its 23 years of existence, working closely with the pygmy population to continue to work for the preservation of biodiversity, improve the literacy rate as well as access to health services and also to continue to resolve land conflicts between the Bantou community and those of Bakola and Bagyeli.