Lessons from Kribi’s port and other heavy industry: problems usually came from timing, and transparency usually helped

• land and livelihood questions that outlive the projects that raised them;
• informal resource users, such as fishers, sand miners and hunter-gatherers, who fall between compensation categories;
• cumulative effects that no single project owns;
• plans that were not published or monitored independently.

The record also shows what works: early, measured baselines, public disclosure and independent oversight. This chapter draws those lessons together and states what we will do differently because of them.

9.1 Fifteen years of change at Kribi

The deep-water port changed the scale of everything around it. The State declared the port of public utility in February 2009 and set the compensation framework in November 2010 [H03]. The first container terminal opened in 2018. A second container terminal began operating on 9 May 2025 [K07]. Traffic through the port rose from about 7 Mt in 2018 to 10.84 Mt in 2024 and 12.7 Mt in 2025, according to the port authority [K08][K09]. Meanwhile, the land reserve was formalised: the 2023 decree delimited a public port domain of about 15,000 ha within the larger industrial-port complex [K05]. In February 2026, KPIZ was launched to develop an integrated zone of about 4,000 ha over 15 years, with a target of up to 150,000 direct and indirect jobs [K02]. Demand for land is strong. By mid-2025 the port authority had received about 150 requests for space covering 3,883 ha, and had granted 48 occupation authorisations covering 196 ha [K25].

Source: Décret 2000/004/PM [B02]; Arrêté 156/MINDAF and Décret 2010/3312/PM as cited in [H03]; Décret 2021/4804/PM [B01]; PAK [K05]; Cameroon Tribune [X01]; Business in Cameroon [K07]; KPIZ launch [K02].

Table 9.1 Key figures of the Kribi industrial-port complex

Source: as cited in the table. Port authority documents are cited by title and date.

These numbers describe a coast in rapid transition. Whatever a steelworks does, it does so in a landscape where land, labour, traffic and coastal processes are already changing quickly. That has two implications. The project’s own effects must be separated carefully from the background trend, or the project will be blamed for everything or for nothing. And the project has an interest in helping to manage the trend, because its own social licence depends on it.

9.2 Land and compensation: what the record shows

The land for the port and its industrial hinterland was acquired under national law. Compensation was paid at official rates: 2,000 FCFA per square metre for titled land and 1,500 FCFA for land being registered. Crops, buildings and graves were compensated according to official schedules. By 2015, land compensation was reported to be about 90% complete, and compensation for crops, buildings and graves complete [H03]. The process later attracted public controversy, reported in the national press, over the eligibility of some claimants. We have not verified those reports and do not repeat their figures.

Three lessons follow, and none of them requires taking sides on contested facts.

Compensation at official rates can leave gaps. National law compensates customary occupants without title only for their improvements, and uses crop rates fixed in 2003 [L08][L09]. People who lose access to land they farmed under custom may receive little, even when every legal step is followed. This is why IFC Performance Standard 5 requires replacement cost and livelihood restoration [G01], and why we will review the legacy of the land we occupy (Chapter 8).

Records matter as much as payments. When it is unclear who was compensated, for what and on what basis, grievances persist for years. A project that arrives later inherits them unless it can show, from the records, what happened. Our legacy review will start with the 2009 and 2010 files, and we will ask the port authority to share them.

Grievances do not expire. A complaint about land taken in 2010 is as real to the person making it in 2027 as it was then. Our grievance mechanism will accept legacy complaints related to the land we occupy, refer them to the competent authority where they fall outside our responsibility, and track them to an answer.

9.3 The coast: an unintended consequence

The port’s breakwater and quays changed the movement of sand along the coast. Before 2000 the Kribi coastline was accreting slowly. Since then it has retreated, by about 2 m a year on average between 2015 and 2020, with much faster local rates near the Lobé falls and Lolabé (Chapter 1) [E02]. A 2025 study rates more than two thirds of the 31.5 km Kribi coast as highly vulnerable, and links this to sediment trapping by the breakwater [E03]. A turtle specialist reports about 15 m of retreat in places at Ebodjé [B05]. The port authority has supported turtle conservation at Ebodjé through its social programme [B07], and has stated that it installed monitoring equipment, though it has not published the data [E13].

The lesson is not that the port should not have been built. The sediment budget of a sandy coast with strong longshore drift is complex, and its response to large structures can only be predicted by measurement and modelling over years. Coastal effects need long, measured baselines and continued monitoring that others can see. They also need management at the scale of the coast rather than the project. For a steelworks on the plateau, the practical lesson is to add nothing to the coast: no jetty, intake or outfall of our own (Chapter 1). The port’s existing and planned terminals serve our logistics, and we support coast-wide monitoring.

9.4 Conservation designed without people

The Chad to Cameroon oil pipeline ends at Kribi. Its environmental and social programme included an Indigenous Peoples Plan for the Bagyeli and Bakola communities along its route. As an offset, it also funded the creation of Campo-Ma’an National Park and a foundation, the Fondation pour l’Environnement et le Développement au Cameroun (FEDEC), to fund the plan and the parks [H06]. On paper, this was ambitious practice for its time. In the field, participatory mapping by Bagyeli communities in 2003 and 2004 found that up to 85% of one community’s livelihood activities took place inside the new park. The Indigenous Peoples Plan was still unpublished and described as a work in progress years later [H06]. More recently, press reporting has said that the marine national park was created without prior community consultation [B05].

The lesson is that conservation and Indigenous Peoples’ rights must be designed together, and with the people concerned. A biodiversity contribution that restricts access to land used for hunting and gathering is a resettlement impact by another name. It requires consent where Performance Standard 7 applies [G01]. Our commitment in Chapter 7, that no conservation measure we support will restrict Bagyeli access without their consent, follows directly from this history.

9.5 Informal users fall through the gaps

The Nachtigal hydropower project on the Sanaga, 420 MW and in operation since 2025, is one of Cameroon’s largest internationally financed projects, prepared under lender standards. It, too, shows how informal livelihoods can fall between categories. Sand miners and fishers who lost access to their workplaces received compensation. Their representatives later described it as inadequate. They filed complaints with the project’s lenders in 2022, and a mediation process concluded in May 2024 [H08]. Sand miners received 6.6 million FCFA for six months of compensation, according to their representative, who said that promised livelihood restoration had not yet materialised [H08]. Closer to Kribi, civil-society organisations have raised concerns about displacement at Lolabé in connection with the planned Lobé iron ore project [H09].

Fishers, sand miners, gatherers of forest products and hunter-gatherers do not own the river bank, the beach or the forest they work. Their losses are real but hard to see on a cadastral plan. The lesson is to identify them early, in the census and in specialised studies, and to design livelihood restoration with them rather than for them. Restoration should be measured by household income and not by cheques issued, and grievances should be resolved before they need outside mediation. In Kribi, the groups most at risk are artisanal fishers and fish processors, sand extractors along the streams and coast, and Bagyeli communities.

9.6 What disclosure added at the Kribi gas power plant

The 216 MW Kribi gas power plant was financed with support from the IFC and MIGA. Its environmental study produced the only measured air quality data we could find for the Kribi area: diffusion-tube measurements of sulphur dioxide and ozone in 2006 [E06]. The lenders’ review summaries are public [E15][E16]. MIGA reported in 2014 that monitoring in 2012 complied with the applicable guidelines, but did not publish the measurements [E16].

That is better than nothing, and it is the reason we have any baseline at all. It also shows the limit of disclosure without data. A statement that monitoring "complied" cannot be checked, compared or reused. Had the monitoring data been published, they would now form a ten-year record of air quality on the Kribi coast, valuable to every project that followed. We will publish our monitoring data, not just our conclusions (Chapter 10).

9.7 What modern EAF plants show

Two disclosures by the IFC show what EAF plants achieve under lender supervision. The first is a 2010 review of an Egyptian steelmaker’s expansion with direct reduction, EAFs and a hot strip mill. It records baghouse dedusting, the crushing and sale of slag to the construction industry, and large-scale recycling of process water [T09]. The second is a 2026 review of a Malaysian EAF rebar works with 600,000 t a year of steelmaking capacity. It records dust held at or below 30 mg/Nm³, recovery of EAF dust for zinc, sale of slag, about 80% water recycling, and grievance and engagement plans with deadlines [T08]. Neither plant is a perfect model for Kribi. Both confirm that the techniques described in Chapters 4 to 6 are proven, affordable and expected.

9.8 Cumulative effects need a shared table

The most important lesson is also the hardest. The pressures on the Kribi coast come from many projects, each assessed on its own. They include:

• the port’s existing and planned phases, among them a mineral terminal of 125 Mt a year, for which a memorandum of understanding was signed on 4 November 2025 and which the port’s Director General expects to be completed within five to six years [K19][K02];
• new railways, including a memorandum of understanding signed in June 2026 for an Édéa to Kribi, Lolabé and Campo line [K20], and the agreements for a railway from the Mbalam iron ore deposit to Kribi [K21];
• the planned Lobé iron ore project [H09];
• cement plants and quarries;
• the gas power plant;
• the build-out of the industrial zone itself.

Each may be acceptable alone. Together they determine the airshed, the sediment budget, traffic on the N7, in-migration and hunting pressure on Campo-Ma’an.

Table 9.2 Lessons from the record and Cameroon Steel’s response

Source: as cited in the text [H03][H06][H08][H09][E02][E16][B05]; Cameroon Steel commitments (planned).

Decree n° 2013/0171/PM and the 2016 order already provide a vehicle for this. A strategic environmental assessment is required for industrial zones and industrial-port complexes [L03]. We will support an assessment at that scale, in which the port and zone authorities, MINEPDED, tenants, communities and the conservation authorities agree on shared baselines, thresholds and monitoring. We will offer our own baseline data to it from the start. We will propose that the zone’s tenants co-fund shared monitoring stations for air, water and the coast, with results published in one place. A steelworks cannot solve Kribi’s cumulative pressures. It can refuse to add to them unknowingly, and it can help build the institutions that manage them.