Nachtigal Hydropower Co-01

Issues

Sectors

Project

Name: Nachtigal, Nachtigal Hydro IPP

Investments: IFC 37673, IFC 13075

Client: NACHTIGAL HYDRO POWER COMPANY

Support: Equity, Loans, Risk Guarantee, Risk Guarantee

Country: Cameroon

Complaint

IAM: Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO)

ID: cameroon-nachtigal-hydropower-co-01

Date Filed: April 19, 2022

Status: Active

Description

In April 2022, Green Development Advocates lodged the complaint on behalf of communities living near the Nachtigal Hydropower Project. Green Development Advocates is a non-governmental organization (NGO) serving as the secretariat of IFI Synergy Platform, a network of NGOs based in Cameroon. The complaint raised environmental and social concerns including: inadequate stakeholder consultations, loss of income-generating activities for fishermen, sand extraction workers, and fish traders, insufficient and late compensation to the people in the affected communities that were compensated, improper and inadequate implementation of physical resettlement, relocation and destruction of sacred sites, increases in negative social issues including theft, juvenile delinquency, gender violence and certain diseases, environmental impacts (scarcity of rain, fish and healing plants, temperature increases and CO2 emissions above the project’s ESIA forecast), inadequate grievance mechanism, and impacts on crops outside of the initially designed project area covered by the environmental and social impact assessment, for which such neighboring communities have not been compensated. The complainants have also filed complaints in the African Development Bank Independent Recourse Mechanism and the World Bank Accountability Mechanism.

Complaint Stages

Timeline