Guardian · 6 hours ago

One Green Shoot at a time: the Women Restoring Mangrove Forests in the oil-ravaged Niger Delta | Global Development |...

In the oil-ravaged wetlands of Nigeria's Niger delta, where rivers once ran black and mangrove forests were lost to decades of pollution, Martha Agbani has chosen a form of resistance that takes root slowly and deliberately - one fragile green shoot at a time. Shaped by her mother's activism and the 1995 execution of Ogoni environmental campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa, which she says "opened my eyes to what really lay behind the destruction of my home town," Agbani founded the Lokiaka Community Development Centre to train women not just to plant trees, but to reclaim the forests, fisheries, and sense of ownership that oil extraction stripped away. In the swamp flats of Teenama, her trainees move through the mud with spacing sticks and saplings, guided by a hard-won understanding that restoration is a practice of attention, not just effort - and since 2018, they have planted three million mangroves across 190 hectares of reclaimed swamp forest. What makes this work quietly radical is who is doing it: women who were rarely consulted about the destruction of their environment are now leading its healing, and in doing so, rewriting what stewardship looks like in a place long defined by loss. "Life is returning," Agbani says - and in those three words lives the full weight of what has been taken, and what is being, carefully, given back.