- SOCIO – ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES
The overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the Archdiocese consist of self-employed farmers. Industrial activity is virtually non-existent. The cultivation of local food products such as maize, vegetables, potatoes, beans, yams, cassava, etc., has become increasingly very important over the years and constitutes the mainstay of the economic life of the majority of the people of the Archdiocese.
The most important cash-crop is Arabica Coffee grown on small family holdings and exported through Cooperatives. However, its cultivation has diminished considerably over the last twenty-two years, due, principally, to lack of incentive to the farmers and very low prices in the world market and also given the heightening socio-political crises in the region.
Rice-growing still continues in parts of the Ndop Plain (Upper Nun Valley Development Authority – UNVDA). The UNVDA project has, of recent, been revamped.
The Bamenda Grasslands are excellent pasturelands for cattle breeding, and cattle are exported from there to other parts of Cameroon, principally to the South-West and Littoral Regions.
For over some years now, the inhabitants of the Archdiocese of Bamenda have continued to be deeply affected, along with other Cameroonians, by the devastating economic decline which hit Cameroon in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The situation has really deteriorated within the last five years because of the Anglophone crises. Businesses have collapsed and many people have escaped from their villages to seek refuge in other towns and cities of the country and others are refugees in Nigeria and other neighbouring countries. A very clear sign of this poverty is the fact that many families feel unable to bring their patients to hospital on account of their inability to pay the hospital bills. Many families in the rural areas are also unable to send their children to primary school, not to talk of secondary education. Education has virtually been grounded in most of the rural areas of the Archdiocese of Bamenda.
Most of the 1.457.053 people living within the Archdiocese also have no access to good sources of drinking water, permanent housing, electricity, marketing and recreational facilities. Therefore, because of the absence of socio-economic infrastructures in the remote villages, the youth populations have drifted and are still drifting to the main town of Bamenda and beyond in search of a better standard of life. Christianity is the main religious practice in the Archdiocese.
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