Cecile Ndjebet

Launched publicly in 2009, Cecile has created a network of grassroots women African farmers (REFACOF) and advocates in 20 countries. Its common focus is the growing amounts of previously farmed land now being classified as degraded and returning these lands to cultivation through commonly used agroforestry practices.

To date, REFACOF’s impact includes directly rehabilitating tens of hectares of degraded land across nine coastal community forests through its network of women farmer members in Cameron. Indirectly, through changes in government policies and widespread adoption of REFACOF’s methodology by other farmers, a total of 600 hectares of degraded land and mangrove forests across Sahelian countries have been restored, with a vision to revive more than 1000 by 2030.

The crux of Cecile’s idea is that African women – farmers on the ground, changemakers in government ministries and recruiting peers in inter-governmental networks, and peer supporters in business and philanthropies, with all of them working together (REFACOF), are the key to reclaiming increasing amounts of degraded land in Africa. This is part of her early lived experience as a widely acclaimed community forester in Cameroon, and how she scaled up that experience to a continental level when she created the REFACOF network, the African Women's Network for Community Management of Forests—a growing movement committed to restoring both land and rights. Through REFACOF, women are no longer just stewards of the land; they’re influencing the rules that govern it.

At the heart of her vision for REFACOF is achieving Full Economic Citizenship for African women farmers. This aspiration was enshrined in the Declarations agreed upon by participants at the Yaoundé Conference in 2009, which laid out the "what," leaving it to REFACOF to develop the "how." The first of these how-to steps was formally presented to the entire network in February 2023, marking a pivotal milestone. It was swiftly endorsed as a best practice by member countries and enthusiastically adopted by women farmers across the network, signalling a shared commitment to transforming declarations into tangible, ground-level change.

The single largest obstacle to African women farmers attaining full economic citizenship is their limited access to affordable, secure, and enforceable land tenure. While women are the backbone of agricultural production across the continent, their rights to land remain precarious, undermined by a tangle of legal and cultural systems. In many countries, customary law restricts land ownership to men, as seen across the Sahel, where only male heads of households are granted land rights. Even where formal legal frameworks recognize women's rights to land, these laws often coexist in tension with customary norms, creating a minefield of contradictions. In places like Nigeria, for instance, statutory law may permit women to own land, but customary practices continue to deny them that access. When women try to assert land claims, they face steep costs—both financial and social—whether navigating complex legal channels or risking disputes from community members under customary authority.

As a result, women, particularly women farmers, remain excluded mainly from land ownership. Despite their outsized contributions to food production, the numbers are stark: less than 10% of land in sub-Saharan Africa is owned by women, according to World Bank and UN Women studies. That figure drops to 6% in Cameroon and only 18% in Nigeria. Yet Nigerian women comprise 68% of the agricultural workforce and produce nearly 80% of the country’s food.

This disconnects between responsibility and rights leaves women especially vulnerable in times of crisis. For instance, the recent Sahelian experience with an outbreak of militia violence in Burkina Faso exposes the fragility of the customary system meant to protect women. Traditionally, village chiefs and male leaders were entrusted with women’s welfare. But when militias overran communities, these leaders were powerless. Women and girls were abducted, and upon returning—if they returned at all—were often rejected and ostracized by the same communities that had failed to protect them. This breakdown underscores how fragile and inadequate the current land and governance systems in the region are when women’s rights are not formally protected and enforced.

By 1999, Cecile was already recognized in Cameroon and the international agriculture community as an expert in creating Community Forests and demonstrated results that met or exceeded the expectations of international donors. What she wanted then as a next step was to figure out how to make women farmers the focus of this work. From 1999 to 2001, she created the design and training requirements for that program and founded an NGO, Cameroon Ecology, to take the program forward. The Ministry of Forestry approved taking it on as a pilot and agreed to hire Cecile, although in an “on paper” secondary role.

In the interim between the launch of Cameroon Ecology in 2000 and REFACOF in 2009, Cecile was viewed by the wider community in Africa and abroad as someone who could take on region-wide challenges. For example, in 2005 she was called in to draft Forestry Laws for Liberia as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is why, when Cecile announced the Yaoundé Conference in 2019, governments from across Africa sent their senior Forestry and Agriculture people to be part of what was seen as a celebration of her work in creating an Agroforestry initiative that dealt successfully with agriculture and forestry, and the growing role of women as they took on and applied a wider role in their practice of Agroforestry for any number of reasons – to address climate change and to strengthen the fabric of rural communities.

The most recent of these how-to steps was unveiled by Cécile in February 2025: the Customary Land Allocation Certificate. Launched first in Togo, the initiative gained rapid traction across the network, with successful replication in several countries in just over a month. In Cameroon, it has already been adopted in 30 villages, while in Togo, over 2000 women have secured their land rights through the initiative—marking a breakthrough in securing enforceable, locally recognized land tenure for women farmers.

What the Certificate does is, under traditional law, transfer to the wife the ownership of forested areas where the husband’s wife works with her children. So long as she does not leave the marriage the customary ownership of that land remains with the wife and her children who inherit the land when their mother dies. When it is entered, the fact of that Certificate must be announced and described in a formal ceremony with the community by the Village Chief and in the presence of the husband. That Certificate confers a recognized heritable right and, as such, cannot be superseded by the Village Chief or any other third party.

Over the next 5 to 10 years, REFACOF plans to work with legal partners and national stakeholders to bring the Customary Land Allocation Certificate before parliament, with the aim of formalizing it into statutory law. At the same time, she is working to expand the model across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, where women face strikingly similar barriers to land ownership.

Born and raised in rural Cameroon, Cécile developed a deep connection to the forest early on, shaped by the tireless work of her mother and elder sister—women who farmed land they could not legally own, raised children, and gathered forest products for survival. These experiences taught her that the forest was not just a source of livelihood, but also of dignity and cultural continuity.

She holds a master's degree in social forestry from Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands and earned a Ph.D. from the Central Africa Catholic University, where she focused on gender and land access in rural Cameroon.

Cécile’s turning point came when she recognized the deep injustice rural women faced labouring endlessly without land rights. “I wanted to protect my mother and advocate for these women, to improve their lives,” she said. That moment sparked a lifelong mission, guided by the strength of generations of women in her family. An encounter with Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai further reinforced her path, leaving her with a message she carries to this day: “Tell African women to care for their environment as they care for their babies.”

In 2012, she was appointed Climate Change Champion for the Central African Forests Commission (COMIFAC). Her work has earned international recognition, including the prestigious Wangari Maathai Prize and the United Nations Champion of the Earth Award.