Gender Biases in the Resource Exploitation and Management of Cameroonian Inland Wetlands Within the Upper Nun Valley, Ndop, North West Region

Abstract

Male and female differentials in the reaping of benefits from space and natural resources have become a contemporary scope in political geography and resource geopolitics of emerging rural areas especially with the new global economies. The teaming trend has been towards a trend inversion of the masculinization of resource utilization and management at the silently unaccepted detriment of the females whose numerical demographic majority in almost all rural communities has been waived aside as the weaker sex for a long time globally. Such female gender though trail longer hours of work on and off domestic chores involving varied facets of community resources management are faced by ugly gender challenges that impede their effective participation in these resources management. This article evaluates the impaired roles of the female gender in community natural resource exploitation in Ndop Central sub-division through data collected with the use of questionnaires, focus group discussions, key informant interviews and direct observations, which were then analyzed using simple descriptive statistics. Findings revealed that the involvement of female gender in community natural resource utilization in Ndop is strongly correlated with their socio-economic and demographic characteristics. The results posit that the key factors that affect the participation of female gender in land, forest and water resources utilization and management are cultural practices as manifested through limited access to land, lack of formal education as well as the absence of female gender in community development programs. Though Cameroon has made frantic efforts at promoting the participation of female gender in Ndop in community resource management through legal and institutional frameworks, this study entreats on the government to reinforce the implementation of texts ratified especially at the grass root level like the Upper Nun Valley of Ndop, where customary law predominates within a matrix of patriarchal customs and traditions give the female gender hopeless hope.