About one hundred young people from the Mbalmayo Arrondissement, close to the Cameroonian capital, have just ended a training on tilapia farming. In addition to the knowledge acquired, their training was concluded with the donation of three cages to start their farming activities by the management of the tilapia farming development project in Cameroon, led by the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries.

According to Divine Tombuh, Coordinator of the above mentioned project, which benefits from the technical support of FAO, this initiative will soon be extended to three other production areas. These are Yabassi, a town where an intense fishing activity is developing on the Moungo River, Mbambalangqui which has a part of the water retention from the Bamendjin dam and Lagdoqui where a dam of the same name is located.

The Cameroonian public authorities seem to have embraced this type of farming because it is more performing in terms of productivity, we learned, but also because it is carried out in streams. This, according to the project managers, is a real opportunity for the country, since it has “over four million hectares of fresh water bodies”. As a reminder, yearly imports of fish in Cameroon sometime go up to 200,000 tons, due to the deficit in the local production.