Nearly 6,000 schools have been forced to close down in the Anglophone regions of the Northwest and Southwest Cameroon due to the secessionist violence blighting that part of the country for the last three years.
With one month to go before the start of the school year, several voices are being raised decrying this situation, which keeps more than one thousand schoolchildren in the dark.
According to Felix Agbor Balla, a member of the Cameroon Anglophone Civil Society Consortium (CSCAC) and president of the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa (CHRDA), measures are underway to publicly demand the resumption of classes in the affected regions.
According to him, this means not only calling on “separatist leaders to ask their fighters to stop attacking schools and universities, teachers and students,” but also urging “the government to intensify its efforts to ensure the safety of school infrastructures, teachers and students in English-speaking regions, while exhorting parents to overcome their fears and send their children to school.”
In a report published in June 2019, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said there are more than 600,000 out-of-school children in that part of the country.
MBOG/te/lb/as/APA