Ogoni Women's Mangrove Reforestation — Lokiaka Community Development Centre (Bodo Creek, Nigeria)

The Lokiaka Community Development Centre, founded by Ogoni activist Martha Agbani, runs a women-led mangrove restoration programme in Rivers State, Nigeria, responding to decades of oil pollution that destroyed mangrove swamps around Bodo Creek — including the 2003 Bodo Creek oil spill — and undermined the fishing and farming livelihoods that local women depend on.

Beginning with training in 2016 and active replanting from 2018, the centre has trained roughly 300 women across four Ogoni communities (Bodo Creek, Yaataa and Teenama among them) in nursery-raising and planting techniques. As of early 2025, the women had collectively planted 2.6 million mangrove seedlings, which Lokiaka estimates survive at a rate of 80-96% depending on the site. The organisation aims to plant a further 5 million trees over the following five years.

Participation is nominally voluntary, but it has opened new income streams: some women sell seedlings raised in their nurseries to contractors, and others have been hired as paid contract staff on other planting initiatives, in a region where more than 6,000 oil spills have been recorded over the past decade.

The survival-rate and planting-volume figures are self-reported by Lokiaka rather than independently audited, and no third-party monitoring body or certification scheme is cited. Two independent journalism outlets — Mongabay and Nigeria's The Cable — have corroborated the programme's core figures and community-training model through site reporting, but neither reports independent ecological measurement of carbon sequestration, biodiversity recovery or shoreline stabilisation.

Read the full analysis: https://www.thecable.ng/spotlight-martha-agbani-the-ogoni-activist-empowering-women-through-mangrove-restoration/