Background to Living Earth Nigeria Foundation

Living Earth Nigeria Foundation (LENF) is one of Living Earth's international partners. This registered NGO was established in February 1998 and is involved in community development and environmental education, employing Living Earth's approach of enabling communities to identify and address their own environmental problems while learning to manage their own resources.

LENF has been working since 1997 in two key areas of Nigeria: Bayelsa State and Cross River State, which are located in the heart of the Niger River Delta on the southern coast of Nigeria. It is one of the most biodiversity rich areas in Nigeria. The mangrove forest of the Delta is the largest in Africa and the third largest in the world.

The Niger Delta is also Nigeria’s main oil reserves region. Since the discovery of oil here in 1956, there have been major infrastructural developments (roads and pipelines), along with an influx of migrant workers. There are now two million people living in Bayelsa State and this along with continued infrastructural developments is exerting great pressure on the Delta’s biodiversity rich ecosystem.

The natural resources of the Niger Delta are vital to the livelihoods of the communities living there; they earn their living through farming, hunting, fishing and trade in forest products. As the oil industry has grown in the area, increased immigration and access to forests and fisheries, has resulted in overexploitation and unsustainable use of the Delta’s natural resources, threatening the livelihoods of the communities that inhabit the area.

The principal issues facing the local communities of the Delta are:

• Economic stagnation:  In spite of the mineral wealth under the Niger Delta, local people in these States are among the poorest in the country. Classic symptoms such as poor education standards and poor sanitation (leading to illness and high child mortality) are commonplace.

• Over-reliance on unsustainable natural resource use: The Delta’s renewable natural resources are being exploited in unsustainable ways (e.g. clear-felling of forest, fishing with toxic substances, poor soil husbandry), thus the communities’ potential for economic development is being threatened by their very struggle for survival.

• Conflict and mistrust among different sectors of society:  The inequitable distribution of wealth and resources in the Delta region has led to mistrust and open conflict between communities and those they perceive as responsible for the exploitation of resources (government at all levels and oil companies).

• Poor organisational development at community level: The conflict and mistrust among the different sectors has also caused internal conflict within individual communities, rendering many dysfunctional. The youth have become restive as their traditional respect for elders has been undermined due to the practice of government and corporations ‘solving’ conflicts with large pay-offs to chiefs and elders.