Women Lead Mangrove Restoration in Nigeria’s Oil-Scarred Niger Delta

Martha Agbani founded the Lokiaka Community Development Centre in 2003 after her mother’s death. The centre trains women from Ogoni communities to plant native mangrove saplings in the swamp flats of Teenama, situated between the Kwawa and Kpean oil settlements in Ogoniland. Since the program began in 2018, more than 400 women have been taught to use a simple two-metre stick to mark spacing for each seedling, ensuring that canopies do not crowd one another. Joy Lebewi, a trainee, now works alongside a dozen other women, each planting saplings while harvesting crabs and periwinkles for income.

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Decades of oil extraction have left the Niger Delta’s mangrove ecosystem severely degraded. The 2008 and 2009 spills in Ogoniland destroyed roughly 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of mangroves, and Dr Ferdinand Giadom estimates that more than 500,000 barrels of crude have entered the environment over the past twenty years. The loss of mangrove-lined creeks has stripped local fishers of food and livelihood. Shell was ordered to pay £55 million in compensation for the two spills, but restoration remains a community-driven challenge.

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• Over 150,000 mangrove saplings have been planted in Teenama alone.

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• Lokiaka’s teams have restored an estimated 3 million mangrove seedlings and reclaimed 190 hectares of swamp forest across Ogoniland.

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• The Niger Delta mangrove belt is the largest in Africa and the third-largest globally, covering about 1 million hectares.

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• More than 500,000 barrels of oil have been spilled in the region in under two decades, according to Giadom.

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Oluwakemi Odufuye, a coastal ecologist at the Nigerian Institute of Oceanography and Marine Research, notes the broader dependence: “Millions of people’s livelihoods depend on healthy mangroves.” The centre’s approach blends environmental justice, gender inclusion, and biodiversity, aiming for community-owned stewardship rather than top-down interventions.

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• “We want to space the mangroves right,” — Joy Lebewi

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• “Millions of people’s livelihoods depend on healthy mangroves,” — Oluwakemi Odufuye, a coastal ecologist at the Nigerian Institute of Oceanography and Marine Research

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