Cameroon: UNICEF sends 8,000 internally displaced children back to school

Over 35,000 Cameroonian nursery and primary school children from 147 public schools in the Far North Region abandoned school as a result of the Boko Haram insurgency. However, over 8,000 of the children of Internally Displaced Persons, IDP, were traced and returned to school, thanks to a FCFA 460.5 million funding from the European Union to the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, through the ‘EU Children of Peace,’ ECHO Project. The Far North Regional Delegate of Basic Education, MINEDUB, Ousmanou Amadou Garga, said the funds were from the EU’s win of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. He added that, the funding was timely because the children lost almost everything – birth certificates, books and other official papers. 

Also, parents of some of the children were either killed by Boko Haram militants in their presence or separated from them following armed attacks on their communities. UNICEF sources say the ECHO Project has since enabled thousands of refugee and IDP children to be registered in schools and the creation of leisure spaces for pupils. Similarly, teachers and other educational officials have undergone refresher courses and children offered stationery, psycho-social coaching and lessons on peace education, non-discrimination, amongst others. “The ECHO Project, which began in August 2015, has been so timely because the IDP children were not only traumatised, but were in great lack,” points out Ousmanou Amadou. “The problem of IDP school children is so serious that it requires the urgent attention of every government ministry. We need to as quickly as possible determine what has become of most of the over 35,000 children who were obliged to abandon school as a result of the conflict,” Ousmanou Amadou warns.