By Ensah Nadia Nchuo, Okwelians Fellow 2022
Source:https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2018/12/19/cameroon-generation-unschooled-children-could-fuel-long-term-conflict
On the 24th of October 2020, Cameroonians bowed their faces to the ground when news of an inhumane and merciless massacre of 7 innocent children in a school in Kumba surfaced on the internet. It was not the first time a school in the conflict affected regions of the country was being attacked, nor was it the first time a parent sent their child to school and never saw them return home. Once ranked as the world’s most peaceful country in 2012, Cameroon was this year pushed to the 142nd position according to the Global Peace Index.[1] This drop was greatly influenced by the Boko Haram expansion into the far North region in 2014 and the advent of the Anglophone crisis in the North West and South West regions in November 2016. Just like any other sector, education has highly been affected by the crisis. It has been at least 6 years of no school for some children in the North West and South West regions of Cameroon, and more for those in the Far North region, which happens to be the poorest region in the country.[2] According to the United Nations Children Fund, nearly 855,000 students have been deprived of their right to education since the beginning of the Anglophone crisis, and more than 4,000 schools burnt down.[3] Despite the unrest, urban areas are slowly gaining back stability and rehabilitation. Rural areas on the contrary are in a critical survival battle. The proceeding paragraphs seek to highlight the unfavorable conditions the rural child has to survive in, and how these constraints can be overcome to ensure better access to quality education.
I. Challenges facing the Rural Child in the Conflict Affected Regions
It has for a long time been a struggle for the rural child to meet up to global educational standards, worst still in times of conflict. Here, we are looking at children in extremely remote areas, who despite the absence of schools and hospitals, cannot relocate to more developed parts of the country. These children are compelled to survive in deplorable conditions; spending long days and nights with no electricity, no internet connection, no roads and no access to cable network. Right up to 2020, only 25% of people living in rural areas in Cameroon had access to electricity, as opposed to 94% for the urban population.[4] With the instability plaguing the affected regions of the country, teachers have evacuated the villages, schools have been abandoned, palaces and councils are being run from the outside.
In a one-on-one exchange with the chef du bureau of the Divisional Delegation of Basic Education in Menchum, Madam Anang Grace, she mentioned that national and international agencies have been providing humanitarian aid by giving teachers and schools didactic materials to facilitate learning in the division. This support often comes in through intermediaries like parliamentarians or inspectors. In other cases, the donor organizations ask the population to come out to the urban areas to benefit from these donations. The UN office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in their October 2021 36th situation report of the North West and South West, clearly states why it is hard for humanitarian aid to reach the rural people. It explains that humanitarian workers, just like the locals, suffer great danger when trying to access remote communities[5]. For most children in the Far North region, they owe their education to military men, who have gone beyond battlegrounds to classrooms, and taken up the role of teachers.[6]
The effects of war on education has made a mockery of our policies and past beliefs. In times like these when rural children need to be homeschooled, they need educated parents to do the job. But how many of their mothers can read and write? If we were to propose E-learning as an option, how many of them would have access to electricity? As little as 25%, with nearly a quarter lacking access to mobile phone network and ICT tools[7]. These were the same challenges our educational system was faced with during the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic. The effects were visible in 2020, with a 12.40% drop in the pass rate of the Brevet d’Etudes du Premier Cycle (BEPC), compared to 2019[8]. These statistics however do not cancel the past and present endeavors of policy makers to reshape the educational system but should serve as an incentive to do better. In this light, development actors should therefore restructure their policies to reflect inclusivity and adaptability. For the rural child, we must consider imploring the use of informal learning methods and spaces to overcome current challenges.
II. Exploiting Possible Adaptive Solutions to help close the Education Gap
As a proposed solution, learning grounds should be created in palaces, hospitals and churches. These are places which even in times of conflict, people still frequently visit. In order for this to work, local authorities need to regain control. Traditional rulers too have to put in efforts to rebuild trust and respect with their people. The government can facilitate this process by giving these chiefs power and autonomy to govern their people. In a workshop organized on April 26th 2022 in Yaoundé by an organization called Esperanza-Cade, under the theme “Traditional Chiefdoms, Peacebuilding and Endogenous Mechanisms for Conflict Prevention and Resolution”, the Lamido of Kolofata, Seini Boukar Lamine mentioned the importance of decentralization in conflict resolution. He said that the absence of immediate action comes from the process of having to contact the central government to resolve a problem which is rather close to you. If these chiefs can be empowered to govern their chiefdoms, and the confidence between them and their people is rebuilt, then a majority of them will be able to return to their palaces, contain the crisis and coordinate the implementation of these learning grounds. It is important to note that these spaces too can suffer attack in times of conflict, as was the case with the Mamfe District hospital on June 9, 2022[9]. For this reason, the government must take measures to ensure that these sites are well guarded and danger free.
After these learning grounds have been created, the use of arts should be incorporated to facilitate learning, understanding and healing. To support this initiative, development actors have to provide these communities with art material and locally trained tutors who understand the culture and context of the people. Since these rural children have experienced violence and hardship, art education will be a powerful therapeutic method to encourage participation, creativity and growth[10].
Again, as an adaptive measure, the ministry of basic education alongside the ministry of scientific research and innovation must consider developing ICT tools that correspond to the environment of the rural child. These ministries should form a team of crisis intervention pedagogues who will design and record a new Recovery Curriculum for children in remote areas. These records will in tend be put into battery powered MP3 devices and distributed to the children in affected areas. The devices will have a recorder where children can orally respond to questions. The battery powered devices will be non-rechargeable and so, will not need electricity nor the internet to work. As such, these children will be able to continue learning even in the comfort of their homes. This same team will be in charge of running a monthly evaluation to assess the efficiency of the method.
To conclude, guided by the “leave no one behind approach,” we must utilize every available resource to close the gap that exists between children in urban areas and those in rural areas, a gap which has in recent times been widened by the ongoing crisis. In less than a month, it will be the start of another academic year in the country. We must therefore remember the children in villages like Furu-awa, kwa-Kwa, Zeleved, who are still trapped behind the globe. While we can propose and implement adaptive methods to regain lost years of learning, the best way to secure the future of the rural child in the three affected regions of the country is by bringing back peace and stability.
Biography
Ensah Nadia Nchuo is the Executive Director of Leap Girl Africa. She has a Bsc in Journalism and Mass Communication and a Masters degree in Local Governance, decentralization and Development, with over four years experience in drafting, implementing and coordinating projects on community mobilization, girls’ leadership, education and policy reform.
She is also a creative writer and co-author of a poetry anthology titled ‘Inside the Beyonds’. She is currently working with a group of young talented artists, who through passion and advocacy, hope to bring about social and developmental change in Africa.
To learn more about her, follow her on:
Linkedln@: Ensah Nadia
Twitter@: The silenttalker
[1] Institute for Economics & Peace. Global Peace Index 2022: Measuring Peace in a Complex World, Sydney, June 2022. Available from: http://visionofhumanity.org/resources . Accessed 26 July 2022)
[2] International Crisis Group. (2017, October 25). Cameroon’s Far North: Reconstructing amid Ongoing Conflict. 2017, volume 133 https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/cameroon/b133-extreme-nord-du-cameroun-le-casse-tete-de-la-reconstruction-en-periode-de-conflit. Accessed 13 June 2022.
[3] “More than 855,000 children remain out of school in North-West and South-West Cameroon.” Press Centre UNICEF, 05 November 2019, https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/more-855000-children-remain-out-school-north-west-and-south-west-cameroon . Accessed 14 June 2022.
[4] World Bank (2020), World Development Indicators (database), Washington, DC, https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators . Accessed 14 June 2022.
[5] UN office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (2021) Cameroon: North-West and South-West Situation Report, 6 pages.
[6] Moki, Edwin. “Cameroon’s Military, Humanitarian Workers Teach Returning Children” VOA Africa,12 May 2018, pp 1
[7] World Bank (2020), World Development Indicators (database), Washington, DC, https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators . Accessed 14 June 2022.
[8] Kenne, Yannick. “Cameroun – Examens officiels: Le BEPC session 2020 affiche un taux de réussite de 60%.” Cameroon-Info.Net, 28 Aug 2020 http://www.cameroon-info.net/article/cameroun-examens-officiels-le-bepc-session-2020-affiche-un-taux-de-reussite-de-60-381489.html.
[9] David Atangana. “Separatists burn down Mamfe District Hospital.” Mimimefoinfos, 9 June 2022 https://mimimefoinfos.com/separatists-burn-down-mamfe-district-hospital/
[10] Albane Buriel, Sylvie Morais, Monique Loquet. Arts education in emergency humanitarian aid: educational issues with young people living in camps in conflict areas in the Middle East. Vella, R; Saldanha, A.; Macksimovic, M.; Torres de Eça, T. InSEA Seminar: ”Art Education: Conflicts and Connections”, Oct 2019, La Valette, Malta. InSEA Publications, 2019, 10.24981/M2019.14 . hal02300007
