By Leocadia Bongben
Returning from the sea one morning in July with his catch, Nerville Eboma Ndomo, 25, is helped by young men and women at the Ebodje makeshift landing station. His wooden boat with a movable engine attached is pulled out of the water onto the sand for the women (whose main activity is fish smoking) to extract the fish entangled in the net.
Following in the footsteps of his forefathers as a member of the Iyassa clan of fishers, Ndomo, a student on holiday, is trying to perfect his fishing skills. This livelihood is shared by 80 percent of the Iyassa people of Ebodje in the Campo sub-division, Ocean division of the South region of Cameroon (370.9 km from Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde).
“What I have here is sardine (bilolo). The catch is not good, but from mid-August, the peak fishing season is when the catch is excellent,” Ndoma says, adjusting his headlamp used at night to indicate presence at sea.
Ebodje, a fishing community of approximately 3,000 people, relies on sea products, such as sardines, and subsistence agriculture for survival. The community’s coastline forms part of the Manyange Na Elombo Campo Marine Protected Area, which spans 110,300 hectares and encompasses 10 villages, including Ebodje. Here, the marine park lies in the Atlantic Ocean, along the maritime border with Equatorial Guinea. Fishing in Ebodje is exclusively done by the locals, unlike in the Douala-Edea National Park, where myriad foreign fishers, including Nigerians and Ghanaians, are present.
“The Iyassa people have a sacred link with water beings called ‘Mengu’ (mamiwata) and the sea turtle,” the custodian of the culture, His Majesty Ndjokou Djongo Christian Michel, third-class chief of Ebodje, explains. Equally important are the links with Manyange-Turtle and Elombo-Wolf-Rocks, sacred sites of the Iyassa people from which the Marine Protected Area derives its name.
Ebodje is well-known for its turtles, which the locals consider to be family members and popular tourist attractions, as well as the existence of other marine animals that are endangered, such as dolphins and whales.
As of 2025, Cameroon has protected 11.1 percent of its marine areas, according to SkyTruth’s 30×30 Progress Tracker. This step is part of an ambitious goal agreed by nearly 200 countries in December 2022 at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) to safeguard 30 percent of Earth’s natural areas by 2030. Cameroon is a signatory to this framework and has completed and submitted its National Targets in accordance with its domestic strategy, NDS 30, and the Kunming-Montreal Global Goals.
Amidst the challenges facing the world’s oceans are overfishing, plastic pollution, and rising waters. The concept of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) has evolved as a tried-and-tested method of preserving marine life, supporting coastal communities, and contributing to the worldwide 30×30 target. To support this goal, national governments designate MPAs within their territorial waters, with input from scientists, conservation groups, and local communities.
However, achieving the 30 percent marine target seems elusive for Cameroon if the governance of the MPAs is not improved to protect marine biodiversity. According to numerous experts, the procedure for designating the Manyange na Elombo-Campo MPA in Cameroon was not based on any scientific research, and when it was decreed, there was no publicly available management plan in place.
“No research was conducted to support the creation of this marine park,” says Ndounteng Ndjamo Roderic Xavier, coordinator of the Tube Awu (Our Ocean), a Community Research and Development Association, with headquarters in Ebodje. The marine park was also created without a management plan, and consultation with the locals was carried out afterward, contrary to MPA guidelines.
Some members of the community remain unaware of the MPA’s importance and mission, as well as how it will affect their livelihoods. “Maybe the marine park will become like other protected areas on land, where fishing will be prohibited. We are trying to understand the fate of the population in a fishing community like Ebodje,” said fisherman Mambo Emile Ebodje, a native of Ebodje.
Against this backdrop, the marine protected area faces several challenges — ones that the local communities are working hard to mitigate through participatory monitoring. Yet the protected area continues to face threats.
Manyange Na Elombo Campo suffocating?
When a sea turtle specialist named Jacques Fretey visited Ebodje for research in 1999, he stoked the locals’ desire to protect their culture, thus planting the seeds for the establishment of an MPA. “I started a dialogue with Cameroon’s ministry of forestry and wildlife, MINFOF, between 2002 and 2003,” Fretey says.
Twenty years later, in 2021, Manyange Na Elombo Campo was designated as an MPA after local chiefs and university professors took up the advocacy at the level of the administration. However, the official decree contains few details.
The decree states that the objectives of the MPA are to “safeguard this important coastal and marine biodiversity; limit the incursion of industrial fishermen who deplete the sea of fish; protect spawning grounds and preserve certain fish species; contribute to improving local incomes and promote potential sources of income through the development of ecotourism and sustainable artisanal fishing.” It also notes that any human activity that may interfere with these objectives “may only be undertaken following environmental impact studies”.
Notwithstanding, there is little information available regarding the level of protection or management activities of Manyange Na Elombo Campo and other MPAs in Cameroon, such as Douala-Edea in the Littoral region (half land and sea), and Ndongere in the Southwest region, still in the process of being designated.
Yet already, 22.9 kilometers away from the border of the MPA, the Kribi deep seaport (constructed by China Harbour Engineering Company, a division of China Communications Construction Company Ltd. (CCCC), with its headquarters in Beijing) is impacting the marine environment via light and noise pollution, trawler activity, and dike construction.
The environmental impact assessment of the port, conducted in 2021, does not indicate the number of kilometers surveyed, so it’s unclear whether evaluations were done close to the MPA border. While the study depicted a shrinking coastline and the potential for increased pollution, since the project was not within the boundary of the MPA, it did not halt construction. “The concrete bars in the sea modify coastal currents and amplify erosion, already visible at Ebodjé, where the coast has retreated by around fifteen meters in several places,” Fretey says.
This corroborates a 2022 study depicting a weakening coastline and coastal erosion in the area.
In addition, the constant passage of ships close to the marine park creates noise pollution that is amplified in the water, says Joel Wanba Tchinda, aquatic ecosystem management expert, who doubles as fish and megafauna programme officer at Tube Awu. However, he adds, the influence on marine life has not yet been investigated and needs to be measured.
A 2024 article in Mongabay about the Kribi deep seaport cites a water pollution expert, Benjamin Ondo Obiang, who said in the article, “The more solid the infrastructure on the coast is, the more it activates the waves’ violence. As the sea becomes more aggressive, it destroys the coastal fauna and then the beaches. The entire biodiversity of this part of the coast is threatened.” Fretey agrees, saying, “The port has already eliminated nesting sites and nursery areas for marine turtles, contrary to the requirements of CITES, the Bonn Convention, and the Abidjan Memorandum ratified by Cameroon.” (These are legal frameworks for the sustainable management of threatened aquatic and marine wildlife and habitats.)
The marine ecosystem and species conservation could be threatened by industries other than the port. A local NGO, Youth for Promotion of Development, has indicated that the Sinosteel Cam SA (a subsidiary of the Chinese company Sinosteel Corporation) iron project may contribute to pollution by producing excessive dust, which could eventually deposit particles in the marine park.
Wanba highlights that the Sinosteel Environmental Impact Assessment depicted that dust would be projected into the atmosphere. “There is no assurance that the dust, which is composed of heavy metals, won’t end up in the water, endangering both human health and marine life,” he says.
There is also the potential for water pollution, Wanba explains. “Minerals require much water, and the water to be used by Sinosteel is from the Lobe River, 24.4 kilometers from Ebodje. When the minerals are washed, the water is likely to find its way into the MPA, as the sea sometimes moves up and down.”
Other threats loom nearby, Wanba says. Franco-British company Perenco, a liquified gas plant offshore, is also in the area, 68.5 kilometers away. This may explain the “petroleum residue” Wanba says was found at the bottom of the MPA. Camvert, which operates palm oil plantations 33.2 kilometers away, also uses many fertilizers and pesticides, and these are likely to trickle down the river and into the sea, Wanba alleges. Aware of the difficulties facing sustainable and economic development, as well as government development, Wamba says research must be carried out to produce concrete evidence for policy change.
However, Maha Ngalie, Director of Wildlife and Protected Areas at MINFOF, states that in line with conservation strategies, the ministry envisages greater cooperation with the Kribi deep seaport and the industrial projects in the area. “An MoU is being drawn up between MINFOF and the Kribi deep seaport to limit the negative impact of certain activities on biodiversity,” Ngalie reveals.
But, Fretey, who was part of the group that worked on the management plan with NGOs, proposed to the government thinks “The Prime Minister’s Office and MINFOF are aware of the management plan but do not seem to care.”
Participatory monitoring helping Manyange na Elombo Campo
Hundreds of people rely on the waters and the coastal area of this MPA, making it a laboratory for participatory management. MINFOF drew up a document, titled “Guide to the involvement of local communities in the management of protected areas in Cameroon”, which was officially presented on 28 June 2024 in Limbé defining the role of local communities, as well as their involvement in the planning and decision-making process in the management of protected areas to guarantee the integrity of the areas and their enhancement with a view to local development. Communities adjacent to protected areas form committees and collaborate with the conservation office in managing of the parks.
Long before this document, to revitalize Manyange Na Elombo-Campo, Tube Awu, The Turtle House (Fretey’s organization), and the communities have been collaborating despite the lack of a government management plan and prior sensitization.
“We (the conservation office) analyzed the threats and identified several activities to be carried out. We produced a charter for the sustainable management of resources,” says Patrick Maballa Sambou, the conservator of the marine park. Sambou, in collaboration with Tube Awu, prompted the creation of fishers’ associations in all villages to discuss how to surmount three difficulties: the protection of sea turtles, fishing gear impacting the environment, and the closed fishing seasons (a period when fish are allowed to reproduce and no fishing activity is allowed).
“Not only do some of us take part in protecting the sea turtles, making sure the eggs are safe as we monitor the turtles, but we also sensitize our community not to eat turtles that we accidentally catch in our nets, and we report trawlers to the conservator,” says Ela, a fisherman in Ebodje.
The participation of the community is the outcome of an agreement with the park’s conservation office: When sea turtles are accidentally captured, they are reported to the conservator, who then determines how to save them. If the turtle is still alive, they release it to the sea; if not, they authorize the fisher to eat it. While the agreement marks progress, the park lacks rehab facilities and has no way of preventing accidental catch, also known as bycatch, from occurring.
Drawing inspiration from the Iyassa culture, which already has a period of time with no fishing from July to August (called ‘Vilonda’, which means ‘the sea is angry’, referring to storm season), this same time period was chosen for the closed fishing season. Fishing gear called ‘wakawaka’, which has a small net size, was prohibited to prevent juvenile fish from being caught in fish reproduction zones.
After all components of the charter were approved by the chiefs, authorities, and fishermen’s groups, the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock confirmed the document in 2023, which is now used to manage activities of the park. “The charter provides for surveillance with the communities. They fish in 24,000 hectares (of the protected area out of the 110,300 hectares), though not yet demarcated, and it prohibits fishing around the sacred sites, Turtle and Wolf Rocks, drawn from the Iyassa tradition, for about a kilometer, which, coincidentally, are sites of high conservation value,” Sambou says.
“In our tradition, even before the park was designated, the Turtle and Wolf Rocks are our sacred sites, and we don’t fish there. The conservation officer is… following our tradition, [which is] the reason we agreed to this rule,” says Ebodje, the fisherman.“Even though the fishermen in Ebodje village still find it difficult to function as a unit, we have fishermen’s groups to oversee the fishing operation, thanks to participatory management,” Ela adds.
To secure the park, the conservation office patrols the park twice a month for two and a half hours with a team of eight people, including eco-guards and community members. This monitoring is supported by the Cameroon Wildlife Conservation Society, CWCS, whose initiative, funded by Oceans 5, provided a speedboat with a 40 KW engine and GPS to the conservation office.
The Ocean 5 project is initially three years, funded to the tune of $699,000 USD. The second phase is expected to continue the work, but, as CWCS does not get funds from the Cameroonian government, the project stops if the funding ends. Eugene Diyouke, interim coordinator of CWCS, says, “We are enhancing the MPA’s ability to provide conservation services along the coastline of Douala-Edea and Manyange Na Elombo Campo. The project also focused on producing a management plan and other documents to improve protected area management.”
Between 2021 and 2023, trawlers and illegal fishing vessels that spent 800-1,000 hours in the park throughout the year and during the fishing season posed numerous challenges to conservation, such as overfishing and destruction of the marine ecosystem, as well as depleting the catch of local fishermen.
Thanks to training from the African Marine Organization (AMMCO), the conservation office now employs Global Fishing Watch tools to monitor trawlers fishing in the marine park. “We gather information on the trawlers, the name of the company, and the owners, but can only see incursions after and not before,” says Sambou. “Therefore, [we are] unable to stop the trawlers.”
Tube Awu has currently identified more than 40 fish species in the MPA, a process that continues. Among these 40 species of fish, 12 are already on the IUCN Red List as species on the verge of extinction, including sharks, whales, dolphins, and rays. Wanba says through a participatory science program, fishers who know the area and species better collect data at the landing station, including the description, length, and size of the caught species and the nets used. This provides Tube Awu with information about the level of resource exploitation, the current stock, and fishery sustainability. This science program initially ran from September to May in 2023 and from September to November in 2024, as it’s dependent on funding availability.
There are four species of sea turtles: olive ridley, leatherback, green, and hawksbill in Mayange Na Elombo Campo. Among them, some species use the beaches to lay eggs, two species feed in the water, and two species of whales and dolphins have also been identified. Sea turtles come to lay their eggs from September to May, at which time surveillance by the community and Tube Awu is stepped up. Tube Awu trains and remunerates community members who clean and monitor the beach, keep an eye on the sea for potential turtle feeding grounds, identify nesting sites, and transport eggs to the nursery.
All of these activities contribute to gathering data about sea turtles and the features of their egg-laying environment, which helps to lower the risks posed by dogs and crabs. When the young turtles are mature enough to lay eggs, they can return to the beach and do so thanks to the natural hatchery, a secure natural space where the eggs are placed to hatch, according to Yves Maximes Mondjeli Ndjokou Djongo, the sea turtle programme officer at Tube Awu.
In contrast to the former practice of cooking captured turtles as food, community members have been observed regularly releasing the turtles. Fisherman Ebodje said the residents respect fishing and non-fishing times, use appropriate gear, and help spread the word about the MPA’s protection.
“We now use big-sized nets to preserve the fish,” Ebodje said. “Initially, we were eating turtles here, but since the creation of the park, we have respected the law. We release turtles accidentally caught.” “The park provides us with employment because during the egg-laying season, we are recruited to patrol the beach and gather the eggs to protect them from crabs and dogs… We now know the season and how to place the eggs in the same way the turtle left them,” says Ebodje, adding he is eager to make money from patrolling the beach to protect the sea turtles.
“The turtles are an attraction to tourists. We have the Ebo Tour (a community lodge) to lodge people who stay and watch the turtles, some with camping cars. They can watch the turtles arrive, dig, and lay their eggs,” says Ela, who is in charge of the community lodge.
Challenges remain
Despite the potential of the marine park, Wanba says they have observed a decrease in fish. In 2014, 44 species were identified, and in 2025, 32 fish species were identified during the same period and in the same zone, says Wamba.
“The number of sea turtles has decreased from the previous season,” Mondjeli says, despite releasing 30,000 turtles back into the ocean since 2015. 56 nests were found during the 2023–2024 season; 42 were secured, while 14 were lost to dogs, birds, and crabs. The 2024–2025 season also saw the identification of 63 nests, 52 secured, and 11 lost to birds, dogs, and crabs.
There may be fewer trawlers—three entered the park so far between 2021 and 2023—yet technological barriers still pose problems for enforcement. For the past two years, the same three trawlers—Nicolas, Adonia, and Erica 1—have fished in the park. These are Cameroon-flag vessels, but it is difficult to determine the owner. “Signals of trawlers were detected this year, but we were unable to determine if they were coming from fishing trawlers since they concealed their location and turned off their GPS,” Sambou adds. Global Fishing Watch data identifies vessels within the MPA from June 1 to August 30, 2025, for up to five hours, but it is challenging to determine their fishing status
“Within 48 hours, we can use TravelMarine to scan the database and determine who went fishing. We can’t go very far; the fishermen are our eyes and ears,” Sambou says.
Commercial trawlers come to the area because of the abundance of different fish species, including threadfins, croackers, catfish, bonga, and sardine in Manyange Na Elombo Campo and the entire coastal zone. Sardine accounted for 80% of fishermen’s catch in 2018, and was unavailable last season.
A sonar-sound kit investigation by Tube Awu reveals an impact on the sea structure, including mangroves, grasslands, and coral reefs, in areas of illegal fishing.
Because the official MPA decree only states in the objective, limiting the incursion of fishing trawlers, there is very little enforcement capacity. For instance, there are no financial penalties for trespassing in the MPA or Illegal fishing, and the complaints of local fishermen about trawlers destroying their nets, making away with their catch, seem not to attract government action.
“The conservation office intends to provide fishermen with cellphones so they can record illegal fishing activities using the GPS coordinates as evidence,” Sambou says. “[And] planting buoys to demarcate the MPA and the area reserved for local fishers.” He added that the government does intend to produce an official management plan, “which may raise the protection level of the MPA”.
Ngalie of MINFOF says, “The Management Plan will be drawn within the African Development Bank AFDB project to improve the resilience of riverside communities in the area between the mouth of the Ntem and the mouth of the Wouri.” The bank agreed to finance the project, and though communities would be involved, the timeline is not yet known.
Fretey, the turtle expert, says he attempted to include a site of international interest, Chutes de La Lobé, in the MPA designation, but was refused.“It would have been possible, once the port had been created, to create a marine bridge between the MPA and the Chutes, with the port paying a toll to each ship crossing this marine line. Elsewhere in the world, a similar tax system exists between the MPA and the installation of a port adjacent,” says Fretey.
With only five years to go until 2030, it remains to be seen whether the future management plan to be developed in consultation with the community will lessen concerns of fishing restrictions, improve governance, and increase community involvement in Manyange Na Elombo-Campo Marine Protected Area.
This story was produced with the support of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.