One green shoot at a time: the women restoring mangrove forests in the oil-ravaged Niger delta — SkimNews
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- Martha Agbani founded the Lokiaka Community Development Centre in 2003 after her activist mother Theresa Terabiewaa Agbani died, motivated by the 1995 execution of Ogoni campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa, and has since trained more than 400 women across communities to restore mangroves.
- Lokiaka's teams have restored 3 million mangroves and reclaimed 190 hectares of swamp forest in Ogoniland since 2018, with women like Lebewi at the Teenama wetland planting more than 150,000 saplings using a 2-metre spacing stick after learning from early mistakes of overcrowding the canopies.
- Dr Ferdinand Giadom, deputy project director of the Bodo Mediation Initiative, estimates more than 500,000 barrels of crude have been spilt into Ogoniland's environment in under 20 years, with about 1,000 hectares of mangroves directly destroyed in the 2008 spill alone.
- Shell was ordered to pay £55m in compensation to people in Bodo after oil spills in 2008 and 2009, yet Giadom says 'two decades have been lost' in livelihoods.
- The Niger Delta mangrove ecosystem is the largest in Africa and third-largest globally at roughly 1 million hectares, but invasive nipa palms from southeast Asia now crowd out native species, forcing men from surrounding communities to clear land before women can replant native saplings.
- Environmentalists Erabanabari Kobah and Collins Lebeteh caution that success must be measured over time and by who controls decisions, with Lebeteh arguing women 'who rely on and are affected by the degraded environment are often left out' of restoration planning.
- Agbani trains local fishers in species identification and mangrove bud management alongside the planters, aiming for community-owned restoration rather than 'top down' intervention, and says 'life is returning' as fish and crabs reappear.
Why it matters: More than half a million barrels of oil have fouled Ogoniland's environment in under 20 years and destroyed 1,000 hectares of mangroves in a single 2008 spill, yet a women-led network has quietly replanted 3 million trees across 190 hectares using a 2-metre spacing stick and hands-on training, reclaiming livelihoods and food sources that Shell's £55m Bodo compensation never restored.
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