Exclusive Interview with the Executive Director of PADIC-Africa, Dr. Martins Egot on his commitment towards forest conservation
Executive Director, PADIC-Africa, Dr. Martins Egot
An environmentalist and community development expert, Dr. Martins Egot, who is the Executive Director of Panacea for Development and Infrastructural Challenges for Africa Initiative (PADIC-Africa) formally Development Concern (DEVCON), speaks on the fast-depleting Cross River State rich forest reserves; proffering solution as well as shedding light on his foray into environment and community development practice.
* We would like to know what is PADIC-Africa?
PADIC-Africa is an acronym for Panacea for Developmental and Infrastructural Challenges for Africa Initiative. It is a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) working in Nigeria and based in Cross River State, thinking globally and acting locally on environment issues. We started in 2019 as Development Concern (DEVCON), registered with the Cross River State Government as an NGO working with forest communities. We advanced to get registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission Nigeria to give us a wider recognition and acceptance. In that process, we had our name changed from Development Concern (DEVCON) to Panacea for Developmental and Infrastructural Challenges for Africa Initiative (PADIC-Africa) with the same goal and objectives. Simply put PADIC-Africa is an environment and community development NGO poise to enhance holistic community development through participatory action.
we adopt a holistic approach to address environmental and livelihood challenges, making sure that we and our stakeholders understand the intricate linkages and our responsibility in reducing vulnerabilities and enhancing the resilience required for a balanced ecosystem and livelihood framework.
* What is the vision and mission of your organisation?
We envisage an entirely healthy society, through collective actions in rural communities towards improving quality of living through positive attitude to biodiversity management.
Simply put we are working to develop a society where our forest resources are better managed, and the lives of the people are transformed for the better.
* Kindly provide a vivid description of the baseline situations in some of the benefiting communities of intervention, and what specific circumstances did you find worrisome?
PADIC-Africa (DEVCON) have established strong presence in over twenty forest communities in Cross River State spread across the Ekuri-Iko, Okpon and Agoi forest bloc communities, including the Afi mountain communities in Boki local government area. In all of these communities like every other forest community in Cross River state, presents us with alarming rate of uncontrolled deforestation for agriculture and logging, with very little or no government action to control these worrisome activities. We met with communities that appeared completely helpless with high level of poverty, unorganised forest management system and alienation of women in decision making in the communities.
Most worrisome was the fact that people where not organised to face the high level of invasion by timber exploiters from all over Nigeria and International companies. With the low level of awareness on the part of the communities and almost government support. These scenarios informed our decision to join hands with the communities to create positive changes in these communities.
* To what extend has your organization impacted on target communities since inception?
I think we are doing well. If you want to count the number of communities that we have direct presence in Cross River State, cutting across the South, Central, and the Northern Forest communities, they are over twenty communities. Let’s take a few case studies;
Iko Esai community for example, had an international NGO working there, CERCOPAN who worked directly with the community for several years and had an area carved out for the by the community for outright preservation and protection. Unfortunately for obvious reasons CERCOPAN to withdraw from the community leaving no structure in place to continue the project. We are now working with community putting in place community forest management institution involving the Chiefs, women and youths. They now have a community based and community run organization known as Esai Conservation Organisation (ECO) registered with the government of Cross River State as Community Based Organisation (CBO). All our interventions in this community are carried out in collaboration with Esai Conservation Organisation. This for is part of our exit strategy but in place from the beginning of our engagement with them.
If I take you to the Boki axis, we have the popular Afi mountain Wildlife Sanctuary there, that is a critical wildlife hot spot in the state. We met communities that were not quite together in terms of forest protection. The group of 14 communities around the Afi Mountain that were experiencing attacks from different areas coming to exploit the forest resources and even the wildlife. they didn’t have an organized system to police their forest we felt that it was a critical point we should act on. They now have a well organised forest management system with Eco-Guards in all 14 communities carrying out forest surveillance for the communities.
Again, in the Afi region during the dry season or farm clearing season, in the dry season, there is this experience on wildfire attack, the Eco-guards are now on ground against any wildfire outbreak in their farms or forest.
Edondon in Obubra local government area is one of the hot spots for timber exploitation. There is strong impact of forest exploitation there. Our approach in Edondon community is to make them realize that they are losing their God given resources very fast and they should begin to see the implication of that to their agriculture, their water and the general environment including their health, we identify that livelihood is a major push of the people to deforest so we made livelihood options part of our interventions.
Edondon community now have a forest management plan. because they have lost so much of their forest the focus now is to protect what is left through forest management plan , strong surveillance and regeneration. Amazingly, women pickup this project very fast and are running with it. We raise nurseries of indigenous species. We also back them up with bush mango which is an economic tree especially for the women we encourage them to cultivate bush mango alongside their cocoa. We want to ensure that they recover at list 10% of their lost forest in 5 years by planting indigenous species like Iroko, Mahogany, Mumosup, Apa and others.
Cocoa is the major cash crop in this community and we can not stop them from farming cocoa. As we speak, there is a project that has to do with cocoa farmers. We are bringing in experts to expose them to Eco-friendly and sustainable cocoa farming methods that will give them better yield from a very small portion. This is to ensure that there is less pressure in the tropical forest for farming.
We initiated the concept of community driven forest monitoring and surveillance in Cross River State with youths including female youths volunteering as Eco-guards for the community If you visit these communities, you will find young men and women who are trained to carryout surveillance monitoring around their forest. We have over two hundred (200) volunteer Eco-guards trained by PADIC-Africa with technical support by the Cross River National Park, spread across twenty communities in Cross River State, with more communities inviting us to help establish the structure in their communities too. We take women participation very seriously we recognise that women interact a lot with the forest. they are major players in the forest use, they collector non-timber forest products and use the proceeds to support their homes.
* What implementation strategy does PADIC-Africa adopt to achieve community participation in its programmes?
For every project to succeed and be implemented in the communities, the idea from the conceptualization of the project has to be community driven. PADIC-Africa is only a facilitator in all of these projects. Identifying the need is a collective idea and responsibility between PADIC-Africa and the communities, so, we only facilitate the communities to come out with their most felt needs requiring intervention and together set up modalities for project implementation, monitoring and evaluation. for our projects, the communities are in the centre of running it. There is no project we don’t have project implementation committee selected from community members including women and youths. That is the system that runs the projects. In fact, for every decision that we take, even in selecting who becomes member of the Eco- guards, it is participatory, the people decide to nominate their children that they trust to be members of that organization, and we go ahead to provide the basic training that they need, so, our strategy basically, is to have and put the community in the Centre of projects implementation completely.
* Going forward, what are the programmes lined up in implementation for the period?
We have some projects running now with much gratitude to our partners among them are Rain forest Rescue based in Germany, they have been wonderful partners, supporting us especially in the area of strengthening the Eco-guard to protect community forest. This is still ongoing with additional three communities; Ifumkpa, Owai, and Iko-Ekperem. Cross River State Forest is fast depleting and the way to go now is to stop further depletion, and carryout regeneration. We are working with our Eco-guards in different communities to collect indigenous tree species and raise for planting on degraded lands.
In Edondon, there is a training programme on cocoa and this will last for the full season. The project is courtesy of the GEF-Small Grant Programme, which we are running right now with some livelihood support to encourage community members support conservation efforts. We have also started the FAO project in Iko Esai, titled; Enhancing Iko-Esai Community Forest Management Strategy, working with the Iko Esai people, Chiefs, women and youths including Esai Conservation Organisation to strengthen their already existing forest governance institution for optimum performance.
* As the CEO of this organisation what actually inspired you?
I draw my first inspiration from my immediate environment, my community. I come from New Ekuri a community in the heart of the Cross River rainforest surrounded by all the privileges and challenges associated with the forest dependent communities. I could better appreciate nature and also the social deprivation of people leaving in forest communities. The Ekuri people had direct contact with the first international environmental organisations that came to Nigeria like World Wide Life Fund for Nature (WWF), Iroko Foundation and other forestry project in the State. As a flagship community forestry initiative, young men like us at that time were exposed to in-debt knowledge of biodiversity conservation.
As a people, we realised that the forest is our treasure our gold and oil and because we never had government attention, we were determined to build our community by protecting and using wisely our natural endowments this is what we have. That’s the driving force behind my position today.
* What are your challenges?
Like every growing organisation we face our challenges from the internal that has to do with funds and capacity development to high expectations from the communities. The communities see NGOs are the lender of last resort where government attention is almost not felt and because most of our funding’s have been micro funding we hardly are able to do projects that will substantially make impact in them especially in the area of livelihood. In communities when the people have a particular mindset over something, it becomes very difficult to change, you will need to spend quality time with them.
On the other hand, most governments see NGOs as anti-government especially when we speak against their policies and actions, getting information from some government establishment can be challenging. In all of these challenges confronting us because we know what our goal is, we strive to remain focused and determined.
* Any role model?
I have couple of people in environment and community development work both locally and international by their interest, zeal and commitment to nature conservancy and community development the likes of Dr. Oliver Enouh, the Initiator and first Coordinator of Ekuri Initiative, Odigha Odigha, Ody Oyama, Tunde Murakinyo, Robbert Donn to mention these few.