Ecological Tourism and Cameroon �?? Opportunities and Constraint

In the tourism industry, Cameroon has often sold itself as 'Africa in miniature' because of its rich biocenoses representing almost all ecotones found in Africa including a very wide variety of landscape patterns. About 75 percent of the flora is still virgin. The fauna diversity includes rare carnivores, herbivores, primates and a diversity of birds. On gaining independence, the government of Cameroon realised the strong socio-economic potential of the tourism and of course the ecotourism industry as a source of revenue and therefore tried to geared efforts towards its promotion. However, the discovery of oil in the late 70s as a cheap source of revenue led to the neglect of this sector as well as some other important ones thereby provoking the well documented Dutch disease in the country. Of late, there has been a resurgent in the ecotourism business and government policy in this domain are aimed at fostering the sustainable development and co-management of the ecotourism potentials, involving local communities as well as some international and local NGOs. Some ecotourism potentials in Cameroon include; national parks, reserves and world heritage sites. However, these efforts have bore little fruits in terms of attracting tourist to the country and thereby boasting its foreign exchange earnings. This paper analyses the current state of the art of ecotourism in Cameroon, its challenges and prospects to serve the dual purpose of conservation as well as income generation to the local communities. Some comparison has been made with Kenya, which is one of the most popular ecotourism destinations in Sub-Saharan Africa

T.E Ambe, 'Ecological Tourism and Cameroon �?? Opportunities and Constraint', Ecotourism: Management, Development and Impact, pp.. 113-133, Nova Publishers, 2011