Across Africa, mega hydropower dams rise where forests once breathed, kidnapping rivers and drying up life, the plundering of old and new critical minerals expands into communities’ fields, and pipelines redraw the contours of ecosystems and communities’ lives. These are not isolated projects but the landscape of a global economic order that treats land, water, and the labour of working class, peasant women as endlessly extractable – commodities in the name of “development.” Corporations, backed politically and financially by governments and multilateral development banks, pledge jobs, money, scholarships and more yet what arrives is little more than broken promises and broken ecosystems.

The Nachtigal Hydroelectric Dam in Cameroon is one of these sites of extraction. What follows is what women in six communities shared about the transformations the dam has imposed on their households, labour and livelihoods, expenses, health, and ecosystems, and about the debts now owed to them.

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