From April 21 to May 03, 2025, SAILD carried out a baseline study in 04 regions of Cameroon.
The aim of this study, conducted by SAILD (Support Service for Local Development Initiatives) is to provide information on the well-being of indigenous populations and local communities. Data was collected in 32 villages in the South, East, Littoral and Central regions of Cameroon. Over a period of ten days, 02 teams of six-member interviewers recruited and trained for this purpose conducted interviews in 20 households in each village. These interviews were conducted by two SAILD researchers, Fabrice Kengne and Aristide Tchounkeu Nyamsi.
The survey, which lasted thirty minutes per household, consisted in asking simple questions about the goods owned by the respondents and the services to which their households had access in the localities. Aristide describes the situation in all the villages: “In terms of sanitation, we can see that people no longer have access to drinking water. The water points built in most of the localities visited are no longer functional. There are very few health centers, and even if there were, there are no technical facilities or nurses” he explains.
Difficult access to education
In addition, he confides, almost all villages have schools, but most have incomplete curricula and no infrastructure with at most one state schoolteacher; “the indigenous peoples, the Baka, have almost no access to education”. “There are almost no supply points for basic necessities in the localities. They have no access to electricity. The communities’ main activities are farming, small-scale hunting, gathering and collecting” continues Aristide.
According to SAILD researchers, the field visits follow a process that has been underway for months. “We arranged for the activity to be presented beforehand to the administrative and traditional authorities of each locality, in particular the sub-prefect of each arrondissement and the chief of each village. “We also held focus group discussions with the selected households a few weeks beforehand.
We counted polygamous households, monogamous households, widows’ households, single women’s households, indigenous people’s households, and disabled people’s households” they concluded.
This activity is part of the Forests, People, Climate (FPC) project funded by the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA) with support from the World Resource Institute (WRI).
- Sharon Maché
