Establish agricultural training center in Cameroon

Thanks to GlobalGiving donors, the Green Care Team of experts realized one of its great missions of monitoring the extent of land degradation in the Bui Division, Northwest Cameroon. The team which included environmentalist, climate change and justice experts and wildlife experts spent days in the wild going through the least traveled destinations to see for themselves the practical situation on the field at this advent of climate change.

At the end of the trip, the team concluded with regrets the alarming situation at hand and called for immediate action to arrest this environmental trauma.  The issues identified during this trip are overgrazing, severe gully erosion, zero live fencing causing serious farmer-grazier conflicts, unimproved pasture, indiscriminate tree felling and bush burning. The team saw for itself on spot evidence of advancing desert.  It is for these reasons that Green Care team decided to be spreading invasive plant species like Brakaria which is very nutritive to animals and Acacia which is fast growing tree and at the same time double as fodder for animals.  It was more of traumatizing trip as one could hear the team leader John Paul lamented “… I am worried, very worried seeing the situation of our fast degrading environment. As people of the environment we must urgently develop a strategy to arrest the situation…the desert is knocking next door…” Thanks to GlobalGiving funds, the team was able to sponsor the three days trip in the wild and acquire some seeds of Acacia and Brakaria that have the potential to reduce over grazing and erosion. Let join efforts to halt this growing precarious environmental trauma. We remain grateful to global giving donors.

Tree Seed collection intensified

Even though little has been written about the Agricultural Training Centre, Green Care Association (GCA) has continued to function with one of the activities of tree seed collection for the seed bank. This remains an all season activity but it is always difficult to know when seeds are mature for collection. Much exphasis is on Trees species that are near extinct or critically endangered. This exercise has credited GCA as the lead organization around the region with a seed bank and now institutions and individuals visit GCA at any time of the year to get seeds for their private nurseries. The species collected are mostly fruit and trees with medicinal or economic value. It is for these reasons that some community forest and water management schemes keep visiting GCA for seeds and in some cases seek assistance on tree nursery and out planting. Recently one of the staff of Caritas Kumbo Diocese, Mrs. Lucy commented ‘…GCA has made us so comfortable in the domain of tree seeds by providing each time over the years all that we want at the right time…’ As an institution we are also very thankful to Global Giving donors who assisted us to construct the office and obviously space for the seed bank. While making efforts to complete other components of the structure like toilet and verandas we remain very grateful to Global Giving.Thank you so much.