Education in Cameroon: understand, support, act

A legacy of its history, Cameroon has a bilingual education system organised into two official subsystems — francophone and anglophone — that coexist from kindergarten to university. The typical path includes a six-year primary cycle, followed by general or technical secondary education, and then higher education.

Since 2000, public primary school has been officially free: tuition fees were abolished. In practice, however, schooling still carries costs that fall on families — uniforms, supplies, parents' association fees, transport, sometimes canteen. For a household in deep poverty, these “side costs” are enough to close the school's door.

On top of this come sharp disparities: between cities and rural areas, between neighbourhoods of the same city, between often overcrowded public schools and fee-paying private ones. It is in peri-urban neighbourhoods like Nkolmesseng, in Yaoundé, that these gaps are felt most harshly.

School dropout is almost never a question of intelligence. It is a question of conditions: side costs the family can no longer keep up with, a child called upon for small jobs, classes where the teacher faces very high numbers, and nobody at home to help with homework in the evening.

The mechanism is a spiral: a delay sets in, confidence erodes, school becomes an ordeal — then an absence. And once a child has left the system, the road back is far harder than the road to staying in. That is why early support matters more than late catching up.

Girls often face additional obstacles — domestic chores, priority given to boys' schooling when a choice has to be made. Supporting education also means correcting these silent imbalances.

Field experience converges on one clear truth: what changes the trajectory of a struggling child is individual support. Someone who sits down next to them, goes back over the basics at their pace and tells them — with proof — “you can do it”. You are not just closing an academic gap: you are repairing damaged confidence.

That is exactly the role of a homework school. It does not replace public school: it complements it, after class, in a caring environment. AWAKEN DESTINY's homework school, in the Nkolmesseng neighbourhood of Yaoundé, supports children who are struggling or out of school — more than 320 children to date — and puts them, one by one, back on the path to success.

Since July 2026, it has been housed in a larger building, alongside our sewing and soap-making workshops: one place where children and adults take their destiny back into their own hands.

The most complete lever is school sponsorship: for €600 a year (or €50 a month), you cover a child's enrolment in public school, their complete school kit and their support at the homework school for the whole year — with regular news of their progress.

Other forms of commitment exist at every scale: a one-off contribution (€60 provides a month of supervised support, supplies and snacks included), the Circle of 5 for a collective effort of €5 a month, or a corporate partnership for companies wanting to commit to education.

In every case, the rule is the same: AWAKEN DESTINY is a private foundation under Belgian law (BCE no. 1016.499.721) and every euro is traced, documented and visible on the ground in Yaoundé.