Boa Plains-Mokoko River Mapping Project (1998-99)

The Boa Plains region is located roughly 3 hours by car to the north of the provincial capital of Limbe. It love on the Plains; some 21,000 of these make their home in mainly agricultural communities, with the remainder living in densely populated fishing villages near the coast.

In late 1998, Native Lands was invited by the Mount Cameroon Project (MCP), a bi-national British-Cameroonian program, to work with local villagers from the Boa Plain-Mokoko River area on a set of land use maps. The region is located roughly 3 hourse by car to the north of the provincial capital of Limbe. It covers roughly 42,000 hectares made up of nearly 27,000 ha of lowland forest, 4,000 ha of flooded forest, and 11,000 ha of mangroves and other types of marine wetlands and has a population of approximately 50,000 people. At that time, all of this land was under government control; and in 1997 the government announced plans to privatize the land and sell it off to investors, as part of a structural adjustment plan imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This signaled the possibility of expansion of industrial plantations and consequent eviction of villagers from CDC land. The mapping was seen as a way of demonstrating local use and occupancy through time and keeping the land in the hands of local villagers. In the end, the maps and the process that made them possible served to halt privatization plans and preserve local control. They also served to strengthen conservation efforts in the adjacent Mokoko River Forest Reserve, covering 9,000 ha south of the occupied area.