PROJECT ORIGIN

In 1987, the life of the initiator of the Project was profoundly affected following the reading of the book by the famous French agronomist René Dumont entitled "False start in Africa “. She discovered the constraints of tropical agriculture such as fallow, the lack of appropriate technologies. As the daughter of a small farmer taking part in the hard work in the fields during the holidays, she realizes that, 25 years after this book was first published, nothing has changed. She then decides to do something later to remedy this situation and revolutionize African agriculture.

When she had just been oriented in Arts division, the one who dreamed of becoming a lawyer, decided to enroll in Sciences division in order to be able to design and manufacture tools that could allow the mechanization of agriculture. Having become a mechanical engineer, she finally opted for entrepreneurship, considering earning enough money to later start large farms. This leads her to several sectors of activity such as the export of scrap metal, aluminum scrap and lumber.

From the year 2000 the idea of ​​embarking on large-scale agriculture being more and more insistent, she began to study the crops that could be developed, and learn about the failures of famous companies such as SODEBLE (Société de Développement de la culture et de la Transformation du Blé), CELLUCAM ( Cellulose du Cameroun) and MIDEBOM (Mission de Développement de l’Embouche Bovine de Mbandjock). She later realizes that this project in agriculture must be integrated with a local beef processing project that she had previously attempted to carry out.

While the new Project has been in the process of gestation for 6 years, the speech of February 10, 2006 of the President of the Republic His Excellency Paul Biya calling on Cameroonian youth to a “new form of patriotism” led her to the decision to give to the latter , a scale proportional not to her own financial means, but to the challenges facing the country. This is how the Cameroon Agribusiness Project was born. The first version of the Project emphasizes the development of large plantations through mechanization, sustainable farming techniques, improved productivity through irrigation, precision agriculture, cattle fattening.

Thanks to the declaration of 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming by the United Nations General Assembly, she became aware of the fact that, the Project as conceived, once completed, would certainly respond to the problem of food insecurity and create wealth, but would not solve the problem of the low productivity of small farmers, let alone their poverty; thus, on the one hand, there would be a mega-enterprise implementing the most advanced techniques, but alongside a small agriculture which is still weakly productive. She realizes that the goal of revolutionizing African agriculture would not be achieved. What to do?

She obtained the answer to this question on July 1, 2015, during a meeting with the late Clementine Ananga Messina, Minister Delegate to the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, being also an agricultural engineer, who advised her to involve the small farmers and to add arboriculture to the project. She then worked to put this valuable advices into practice, and this has led to the new version of the Project truly more inclusive.