Ben Pollard: Cameroon gets computers and we get to play football

From a lecture by Kew Gardens' Scientific Officer to the Royal Geographical Society

In Britain, Cameroon is best known for its football or perhaps I should say footballers, particularly as the national side, the Indomitable Lions, are current champions of Africa. Now, although football does play a small part in our project, obviously that is not our focus in Cameroon.

So why are we working there and who is it we are working with? Cameroon is situated in the Gulf of Guinea. It has the highest plant species diversity per degree square in tropical Africa.

This richness has long attracted Kew botanists, who have been researching the flora of western Cameroon since 1861, when Gustav Mann was sent by the then Director, Joseph Hooker, to collect plants from Mount Cameroon and the nearby forests. Most of his original pressed plant collections are held in the herbarium at Kew.

Our main collaborator in Cameroon is the National Herbarium, based at the capital, Yaoundé. Since 1996, we have jointly run botanical inventory expeditions; carried out capacity-building exercises, refurbished their buildings and improved the amount and quality of essential equipment, including providing their first computers.

We try to contribute to local livelihood primarily by way of employment of local villagers. Usually we have two or three guides to take us into the forest safely, someone to assist with washing clothes in a nearby stream, a water-carrier and a firewood collector so the three cooks can continue in the most important role of filling our hungry stomachs after a day in the field.

In the last two years we have added an end-of-term spectacle. This usually entails recruiting an Earthwatch XI to take on the might of the local village XI in a football match. I am happy to say that despite the conditions and the talent on view which pervades all Cameroonian football, Earthwatch still remains unbeaten.