About
Ndumbe Knollis Mokake grew up in the Bonavada community at the foot of Mount Cameroon, in the South West Region of Cameroon. He studied geography at the University of Buea, then founded CASAD, the Center for Agricultural Stewardship and Development, to restore the mountain's forest. He watched land degradation and timber cutting thin the forest while the families around it stayed poor, and decided the two problems had to be solved at once. The forest and the people are treated as a single repair.
CASAD restores degraded montane forest on and around Mount Cameroon. It runs community tree nurseries that grow native seedlings, and through community planting it has put native trees back into thinned forest corridors. Alongside the planting, CASAD trains the people who live next to the forest. Smallholder farmers, women, young volunteers and families displaced by the region's unrest learn organic farming, food processing, agroforestry and how to run a tree nursery. The training gives them income that does not come from cutting the forest down.
The method is hands-on and named on his own channels. CASAD plants trees, helps cleared forest recover on its own through assisted natural regeneration, and teaches climate-smart farming. The nursery in Upper Bokova grows the seedlings that feed the planting. The logic is simple and he states it plainly: a family that depends on the forest for its living cannot be asked to stop using it unless there is another way to earn. CASAD builds that other way first, then asks for the forest back.
He runs this with a small public footprint. CASAD has a Facebook page and his own Instagram account carries the nursery work, but the audience is in the low hundreds. In 2026 the Global Landscapes Forum named him one of five Restoration Stewards in the world, chosen from over twelve hundred applicants, which carries a grant, a year of mentorship and a place in global restoration forums. The recognition reaches further than his own following does.
Highlights
- Steward
- Ndumbe Knollis Mokake, geographer and founder of CASAD, Buea, Cameroon
- Nurseries
- Three community tree nurseries growing native seedlings at the foot of Mount Cameroon
- Trees planted
- More than 15,000 native trees through community-driven planting
- Who he trains
- Smallholder farmers, women, youth and internally displaced people in agroforestry and climate-smart farming
- Recognition
- One of five Global Landscapes Forum Restoration Stewards in 2026, chosen from over 1,250 applicants
Deeper Dive
The choice that defines the work is refusing to separate conservation from poverty. Many restoration projects plant trees and leave; CASAD pairs every nursery with training that turns forest-dependent families into people who earn another way. Internally displaced people appear among the trainees because the South West Region has been affected by Cameroon's unrest, and they are among those most pushed toward cutting timber to survive. The model treats their income as the thing that decides whether the trees stay in the ground.
The numbers are deliberately community-scale rather than headline-scale. Three nurseries and more than fifteen thousand native trees is verifiable, local work on the slopes of an active volcano, not a press-release megaproject. Assisted natural regeneration, one of CASAD's named methods, costs little and works with the forest's own recovery rather than against it. The restraint is part of the credibility. The figures are small enough to be true and large enough to matter to the corridors being repaired.
He came to this through a specific training and a specific place. A geography degree from the University of Buea, with study focused on agriculture, sits under the agroforestry work, and the Bonavada community he grew up in is the same ground CASAD now restores. Before the global recognition he was already being noticed by grassroots funders and women-in-agriculture changemaker programs. The mountain is not an abstract cause for him. It is the hillside he was raised on.
The gap between reach and reach is the striking part. Roughly a hundred Instagram followers sit under a global stewardship awarded to five people worldwide, an earlier changemaker recognition, and a working nursery network feeding a forest-restoration effort. The work travels through conservation networks far past his own audience, carried by organizations that amplify it while he keeps running nurseries at the foot of the mountain. He is someone a curious person could find, and almost no one has.
In Their Words
“I owe our mountain ecosystem a duty of change and envision a future where it breathes again, streams flow generously and young people choose restoration over depletion.”
