In August 2023, Mr. Marcel Loyd MINKA received 1200 £ (pounds) from ABF (Aubrey Barker Fund) to sponsor his research study on Participatory Mapping for Land Boundary Conflicts mitigation in Mbalmayo, Cameroon. Mr. Minka started this research study in June 2023 and due to lack of sufficient funding from June 2023 to July 2023, his research study did not move forward. But thanks to the funding received from ABF in August 2023, Mr. Minka was able to complete his research study in October 2023. The following year, Mr. Minka submitted a full research paper manuscript on this study, and this study was successfully published by the International Journal of Social Science and Human Research under their special issue of December 2024.

This study was published as a research paper under the title “Assessing the Contribution of Participatory Mapping Data Collection Methods in Detecting and Mitigating Land Boundary Conflicts on Farm Areas: A Methodological Framework”.

To access this paper, use this link https://ijsshr.in/v7i12/62.php

You can also access this paper using Copernicus through the link https://journals.indexcopernicus.com/search/article?articleId=4149736

Mr. Minka is a Ph.D. Researcher at the Department of Animal, Nutrition and Food Sciences (DiANA) of the Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. His research focuses on “Mitigating land conflicts and securing farmers' land rights through improved participatory mapping”. In 2022, Mr. Minka received a Ph.D. Scholarship from the 'De Africa' project, financed by the Italian Episcopal Conference's Service for Charitable Interventions in the Third World at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy in Agri-food System (Sustainable Agriculture through effective Land Tenure Security).

In the above research paper, Mr. Minka talks about the fact that Land conflicts are a significant and sensitive issue in Africa, and these land conflicts are a serious threat to agricultural productivity. In the abstract of his paper, Mr. Minka notes that now our days there exist several methods of land data collection which facilitates land conflict mitigation, and each of these methods are been explained in various papers. However, none of these papers have compared these methods to bring out their unique contribution as a means to assist practitioners in identifying land conflicts prone areas. His research is centered around the question: what is the distinctive contribution of each land data collection methods in identifying land conflict prone areas during participatory mapping? Using a case study of three villages in Mbalmayo (Cameroon), his research adopts an approach that combines farmland data from interviews, questionnaires, consultative meetings, field visits, demarcation of farm boundaries; recording of Ground Corner Points using Catalyst DA2, UAV flights, and participatory mapping. In his paper, Mr. Minka discuss the usefulness and limitation of each method, highlighting their unique contribution to the holistic understanding of the context of Mbalmayo and the mitigation of land conflicts. His study was conducted from June to October 2023. The results of his analysis shows that amongst the eight methods used to collect farmland data, six of these methods had a distinctive contribution that facilitated the mitigation process by precisely identifying the land boundary conflicts zones. The ideas provided by his paper can serve as guidelines for researchers and practitioners interested in mitigating land conflicts through participatory mapping approaches.