What challenges are African forests facing?

To learn more about African forests, join us at GLF Africa 2024: Greening the African Horizon on 17 September.

Deforestation often conjures a picture of some scary metal-toothed machine chewing up forests and leaving logs in their wake.

In reality, the story is much more nuanced. 

Not only are forests impacted by a wide range of factors, including clearing areas for agriculture, increasing populations and poor land management, but forests in some areas of the world are more at risk than others.

From the rainforests of the Congo Basin to the dryland forests of East and Southern Africa, forests across Africa are being degraded to an alarming extent. 

The main culprit is agriculture, which drives 75 percent of the continent’s deforestation. And yet, 55 percent of Africa’s population depends on agriculture for their livelihoods.

Meanwhile, the climate crisis is disproportionately impacting Africa, making droughts and wildfires become common, while its human population is booming.

In the face of these challenges, there are also countless examples of people fighting for change.

We spoke to two incredible women working to revitalize African forests to discover how their locally-based initiatives are helping safeguard forests and the communities who depend upon them.

Emem Umoh, Nigeria

Emem Umoh is a conservation biologist from Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, founder of the Women in Nature Conservation Organization (WINCO) and coordinator of the GLFx Uyo chapter. 

Umoh has witnessed how her home state, located along the southern coast of Nigeria, has seen its many beautiful ecosystems become degraded through mismanagement by state governments. 

Many of Nigeria’s forest reserves are state lands with legal restrictions against logging, hunting and other disrupting activities, but Umoh doesn’t think these rules are being enforced. She says endemic species are being decimated, while deforestation is leaving the area more vulnerable to the climate crisis. 

“As a young forest officer in the early 2000s, I often assessed how logging companies carved out concessions and bulldozed access roads into intact forests to extract timber,” she recalls. 

“Vulnerable families follow the roads into the jungle. In a desperate search for land and livelihoods, they clear the forest to grow subsistence crops, cutting down all the trees and burning them. After three or four harvests, soil impoverishment forces them to move on and repeat the cycle in undisturbed areas, now with a larger family base.”

Nigeria alone has lost more than 4,800 hectares of humid primary forest since 2002, equivalent to 14 percent of its total tree cover. 

Along with the rest of the WINCO team, Umoh is working to combat deforestation while simultaneously supporting local people in growing food by creating biodiversity-rich ecosystems.

WINCO works in the Stubbs Creek forest reserve, the state’s largest remaining forest. Their team has grown 55,000 seedlings and planted 35,000 trees in the last five years.

Not only are Umoh and her team planting trees to recover forest loss, but they’re also working closely with communities by gifting tree saplings to local people, thus encouraging them to take part in caring for their local ecosystems. 

Fruits from these trees provide sustenance and even livelihoods for those who are trained to process fruits like jackfruit. By creating these alternate livelihoods, they’re reducing the need to clear forests for agriculture.

WINCO was established in 2015 as the first women-led NGO exclusively dedicated to nature conservation in Nigeria. 

“Women are natural caregivers, resilient homekeepers, risk takers to preserve all that’s rightfully theirs,” says Umoh.

“No matter how unproductive or degraded a landscape is, just give it time and see a determined, focused, passionate woman conservationist steadily restore it.”

Kamanzi Claudine, Rwanda

Kamanzi Claudine, the GLF’s 2024 Dryland Restoration Steward, studies conservation agriculture and is the founder of the Forest4Life project. She is based in the Bugesera district of Rwanda, which is an area of dryland forests with low annual rainfall.

More than 65 percent of the area’s population depends on agriculture as their main source of livelihoods.

When I asked Kamanzi to pinpoint the largest issue related to African forests, she named one factor: overpopulation.

Africa is the continent with the highest population growth rate, and the UN predicts that the continent will account for nearly 40 percent of the world’s population by 2100 – up from 17 percent today. 

As communities grow, so does the need for space to live and grow food – which will likely put more pressure on forests. 

But Africa is also the continent with the highest percentage of young people, with around 40 percent of its population aged 15 or younger. This is more than 1.5 times the global average. 

Kamanzi believes young people can carry new visions for change and renewed hope for the future, but there’s still a need for better education across all ages.

“Young people still need more information about good agricultural practices, sustainability and conserving the environment,” she says.

“Older people still have a mindset where it can be hard to understand why we must change things like how we use trees and the land.”

Part of her work with Forest4Life is working with youth in schools to promote environmental education and therefore boost community engagement.

Due to the drier nature of the region, these efforts carry additional weight as deforestation can also lead to desertification – a process by which the loss of forest cover continually dries the soil and slowly turns a once-vegetated area into a desert.

Kamanzi and her team are working to protect their native forests and revive the soil by growing and planting trees indigenous to the area. 

“Planting native trees is important to bring back nutrients to the soil and reduce the need for fertilizers,” she says. “We must do this work to sustain our land.”