In southeastern Nigeria, the forest around Afi Mountain is home to some of the rarest great apes on Earth. Critically endangered Cross River gorillas live here, alongside Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees, drills and other wildlife found in a shrinking patchwork of forest across the Nigeria-Cameroon border. Sixteen communities also share the landscape, depending on its forests and waterways in ways that make conservation considerably more complicated than drawing a boundary around a sanctuary and calling it protected.
Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary was established in 2000, but protection on paper has not prevented hunting, illegal logging, forest fires and the poisoning of rivers for fishing. Conservation organisations and forestry authorities have worked in the area for years, yet enforcement has remained difficult. In several communities around Afi, women eventually came to a fairly simple conclusion: if the existing system was not protecting the forest, they would have to become part of the system protecting it.
One of them was Mary Ofre, a farmer from Ulom. During a burial ceremony in the nearby village of Bamba, Ofre and other women began talking about the damage being done to their rivers through destructive fishing practices. When she returned home, the conversation continued. In 2023, dozens of women came together to form the Ulom Women's Conservation Collective. Similar groups have since emerged in neighbouring communities, including Katabang and Buanchor.
When conservation became something you could do
The women did not limit themselves to meetings or awareness campaigns. They began going into the forest, conducting regular patrols and making surprise visits at unusual hours, looking and listening for evidence of logging, hunting, fires and other offences. They monitor waterways for signs of poisoning, investigate suspected violations and work with community leaders, forestry officials, conservation organisations and local young people when action is needed.
The work can be remarkably practical. When a river has been poisoned for fishing, affected stretches can be temporarily dammed using logs, mud, rocks and sandbags. Women and other community members then remove the contaminated water with buckets and basins before the barrier is dismantled and fresh water is allowed to flow through again. Residents told Mongabay that river poisoning had been drastically reduced in communities where the women's groups were active.
Their willingness to confront illegal logging has tested something harder than their physical endurance: the distribution of power inside their own communities. In 2024, women in Ulom and Buanchor discovered timber agreements involving men in their villages. Rather than accepting the deals as decisions that belonged to somebody else, they challenged them. The women threatened a traditional form of public protest, and community leaders ultimately cancelled the contracts and returned the timber buyers' money.
The significance of that moment goes beyond the trees that were spared. The women had no new government department behind them and no sudden supply of expensive equipment. What changed was their understanding of who had the authority to act. When something their communities depended upon was being damaged, responsibility became reason enough to intervene.
That intervention has not always been comfortable. Mongabay reported ridicule, resistance and considerable personal pressure. One outspoken member withdrew from the Ulom collective after her husband threatened to divorce her. Some groups continue to patrol without basic equipment such as rain boots and GPS devices, and even finding money for motorcycle transport can be difficult.
THE SCALE OF THE WORK
A local idea is spreading around Afi
Source: Mongabay, July 2026. See sources below.
What happens when people keep showing up
It is difficult to measure the recovery of a forest in the timescale of a human news story. Trees do not regenerate because an article needs an ending, and endangered animals do not return on cue. But there are small indications that something around Afi is changing. Osang Sarah, a member of the Katabang women's collective, told reporters that vegetation was becoming dense again. More strikingly, villagers had begun hearing chimpanzees calling again.
That does not mean the forest is saved. Afi remains under pressure, and the women themselves cannot solve every force driving habitat loss. Their achievement is more modest than that, and perhaps more useful because of it. They found particular things that were damaging the place where they lived and discovered that organised local action could make some of those things harder to do.
There is another change taking place alongside the ecological one. Conservation is no longer being understood only as something carried out by rangers, scientists, government agencies or international organisations. Women who farm, raise families and live beside the sanctuary have made themselves part of its defence, and neighbouring communities are beginning to copy them. That may be the most important measure of whether an idea works: somebody else sees it and decides it is worth trying too.
A thought for today
Hope can become strangely abstract when the problems are large enough. Deforestation, biodiversity loss and species extinction are so enormous that an individual person can seem almost absurdly small beside them. The women around Afi Mountain offer a different scale on which to look at the problem. They did not begin by asking how to save a rainforest. They began with poisoned water, felled trees, hunting and rules that were not being enforced. Those were things close enough to touch, argue about, patrol and sometimes stop.
A forest is still standing around them, and somewhere inside it chimpanzees are being heard again. That is not proof that everything will be all right. It is evidence of something smaller and more defensible: when people discover that a problem is not entirely beyond their reach, the direction of a story can change.
THE REPORTING BEHIND THE STORY
Read the original report
Orji Sunday's reporting for Mongabay documents the women-led conservation collectives in Ulom, Katabang and Buanchor and the work spreading across the Afi landscape.
Sources and further reading
- Mongabay: The women leading a quiet conservation revolution in a Nigerian gorilla sanctuary Orji Sunday's July 2026 field report on the women's collectives, their patrols, river protection, enforcement work and expansion across Afi communities.
- Mongabay: Women's collectives are protecting Nigeria's gorilla wildlife sanctuary A short overview of the conservation initiative and its reported results.
- Wikimedia Commons: Cross River gorilla photograph Hero image by Julie Langford, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. The photograph depicts Nyango at Limbe Wildlife Centre in Cameroon.
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Licence terms for the hero photograph.