A special experience for Indigenous organisations and communities!

By Tim Emini of Okani

A special experience for Indigenous organisations and communities!

The Indigenous Navigator project is a perfect illustration of how indigenous organisations and communities can already today lead their own destiny by themselves. Okani and Gbabandi’s experience of the implementation of the Indigenous Navigator micro-project on “access to citizenship” in Cameroon shows that it is possible.

Local indigenous organisational capacities have been reinforced and built around the ideology of "learning by doing", and indigenous community midwives and community relays have been trained in birth registration.

We are now halfway through the implementation of this micro-project, whose focus is on the accompaniment of indigenous forest communities in the establishment of birth certificates, and there is real satisfaction. How did we get here?

• Self-confidence
• The inclusion of all the actors
• And hard work

In Zone 1 of the micro-project (Mambélé, Boumba and Ngoko), Okani and local partners have gone through the difficult stage of setting up the files with the courts. We have been able to mobilise the magistrates of the Yokadouma magistrates' courts. We have already been able to organise three (03) large mobile court hearings. All that remains now is to withdraw the decisions. In mid-December 2020 and January 2021, we will have finished with the establishment of over 300 birth certificates.

It is a total satisfaction to have done this work. Indigenous peoples can lead their development on their own !

For more information on the situation of citizenship for Cameroon’s indigenous forest peoples see here: https://www.forestpeoples.org/en/node/50337

Copyright/photographer

OKANI