Faced with the wide range of business opportunities, jobs and especially training offered abroad and particularly in developed countries to attract citizens of the world, the existence and gestation of reference establishments in developing countries, without omitting to specify the rectifications or improvements of the multiple limits of a set of education systems that are mostly failing, show that it is just as possible to produce quality fruits everywhere in general and in the most remote corners of sub-Saharan Africa particularly, on the condition that governments and their multiple branches are really keen to do something good and better over time because, whether we are in town or in the countryside, we must have the minimum necessary, namely : spaces sheltered from bad weather, teaching materials even if they are incomplete, communities which truly demonstrate the desire to see their schools evolve and produce good results, teachers of well-paid quality and above all a real political will to change the working conditions of teachers and student learning in an African sub-zone which alone concentrates the largest out-of-school population in the world, i.e. 30% according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) dating from April 2023¹.

This determination to do something better over time in the Cameroonian context in particular is a serious process during which everything is implemented gradually so that the one who is at the centre of the learning i.e. the pupil or student receives quality teaching regardless of where he or she is. But even if the high concentration of school infrastructure in large metropolises responds as best it can to an ever-increasing demand, the deplorable state in which certain learners receive education in rural areas suggests that we find ourselves in another State when in fact it is the same. And even if this situation could make one think that students from rural areas are left behind, it must still be made clear that the situation in rural areas is only a miniaturized replica of what is happening in urban areas because some establishments are created without meeting the required conditions. The creation of an establishment has become a business opportunity for promoters more concerned with making money than meeting the necessary conditions in the short, medium and long term, due in part to a generalized laxity having allowed a good number of people to do whatever they want, while learning as well as the quality of teaching are requirements which are part of a mobile process of social success and not stagnation in a mediocrity which favours the proliferation of jobs indecent and poorly paid teachers living for some in a certain precariousness which is downright assimilated to a forced volunteer activity which does not promote the hope of a better tomorrow in an unpleasant and unattractive present despite the efforts made to try to put an end to the multiples problems.

The fact of continuing your studies in Africa and Cameroun in particular does not mean that the quality of the training will be bad. Image source : commons.wikimedia.org

Learning process and continuous improvement of working conditions

The completion or success of a true learning process requires constant improvement. To do this, it is necessary to go from a point A which is a starting point, to a destination point B which is a targeted objective and not the exact copy of the initial point of a project of circumstance or construction of poorly maintained class which after a few years due to lack of upkeep or maintenance will find themselves in deplorable conditions. In 2024 in Africa and in Cameroon in particular, children are still receiving lessons in precarious or temporary conditions within private and public State establishments with aspects denoting a worrying degree of consideration coupled with scabrous management of the careers of teachers having given rise to a business that has become unbearable to the point of having generated a succession of strike movements between February 2022 and early 2024 in part because of the years of work without pay², useful assignments having taken on the appearance of a strategic plan in view of forcing State professionals to go to the centre to negotiate a better lot, teachers who live in precariousness despite a high index scale, and obligations without guaranteed security measures among others.

Speaking about the Cameroonian education system, a teacher-researcher said to his students during a teaching unit that this system only trains unemployed people. It is very important to understand the meaning of the word used. The term unemployed here means good for nothing, that is to say, without qualifications due to lack of practice in universities which suffer from a very large deficit in quality technical facilities. Well aware of the fact that an unemployed person is someone who previously has a qualification and that for public opinion the term unemployed also designates those who have university diplomas and find themselves, for the most part, obliged to take refuge in small income-generating activities that generally have nothing to do with what they studied at university in order to survive, this teacher spoke of unemployed in the sense of the certainty of not getting a job with an education system that assimilates the university to a business where we do not produce qualifications when that is not the case.

The Cameroonian education system today is forced to reinvent itself continuously because the mentalities of the four decades after independence persist until now to the point of making people believe and rightly because of the non-existence and/or insufficiency of technical platform that university or school is of no use and that it is better to learn a "small job" while this is not true.

To be able to focus more on entrepreneurship today, the system had to question itself in order to make more significant proposals which, however, did almost nothing to change the fact that not only technical and secondary education establishments even universities are under-equipped or not at all, and this has been the case for many years after their creation.

In many secondary and even university establishments, the practice is just a chimerical reality. And on this subject, another teacher-researcher said: If you take the theory that you receive at university as professional training, you will not be without qualifications. This means that even if the courses are theoretical, they are in fact practical courses; you should therefore take your own training into your own hands since the government has shown itself incapable of responding to students' concerns.

If in fact the theoretical courses do not suffer from any quality problem, there is however the thorny problem of the lack of practical knowledge which remains and which the student must himself give himself the means to acquire through his personal efforts. In other words, we ask students to do a lot with little or almost nothing, while hoping to have something better that at the present moment we are not in a position to give them and that they must seek for a large majority by their own means, the available resources being insufficient and reserved for a very small minority of schools and privileged students due in part to the better quality of their project or quite simply to the fact that they are incontestably the best.

Today we are talking more and more about entrepreneurship because we realized that our training approach was not good or that it was simply mediocre because if you teach, for example, a student to do an experiment which requires the use of a beaker in a theoretical way, he would have to have already seen a beaker³ himself and use it for this experiment and not be satisfied with a drawing or theoretical support. 

Also read: Win-win partnership and improving the living conditions of Cameroonians

There is no training without experimentation. The colonial model of education or training is outdated and it needs to be rethought because currently and everywhere in the world, the private sector has a greater role to play in the economic growth of a country. "A stronger private sector will help Cameroon better harness its natural resource endowments and generate more economic opportunities for its growing population⁴”. This is one of the reasons why it is important to encourage youth entrepreneurship even if it is not all young people who will create businesses. But that is not the most important thing.

The most important thing is to abandon the idea of ​​a school which is of no use because it is not only in Cameroon that there are unemployed people. It is just the fact that the scale of the problem is greater in poor countries and encourages massive exoduses towards Europe, the United States and Canada to cite only these examples because certain people can no longer stand staying in countries where they have the impression that there is no future and that they must necessarily look elsewhere at all costs because it is there that they will find a happiness that they do not find in their country but which is also possible there with the only difference that the external proposals are more satisfactory and attractive. The proof is the number of doctors and teachers who have chosen to migrate abroad where they receive salaries that they would never have had if they had remained in Africa or Cameroon.

Students from the most remote corners also have the right to dream. Illustrative image source. Datacameroun.com

The privilege of quality education

Despite the quality of the different standings or the big gap regarding in particular the means that certain States implement to have a better quality education system, the fact of continuing one's studies in Africa and in Cameroon in particular does not mean that the quality of training will be bad. What is done elsewhere is also possible locally. The problem lies in the means that some are ready to implement for the comfort of pupils, students and teachers.

Those who have more financial means enroll their children in private schools or institutes because they believe that the quality of education and teaching is better there. But quality is not measured only by the quality of teachers and education. Whether in the public or private sector, the teachers are of quality. Some even believe that those in public establishments are better. But that doesn't matter. what matters is the fact that in private establishments of reference (since there are some which are disastrous), administrations place a lot of emphasis on details that others will not emphasize enough or not at all as for example building maintenance, discipline, and for some schools, rigorous selective competitions to have better quality products in order to contribute to providing a better quality product. But does this mean that on the public establishment side there are no products of good quality or better quality? No way! Each establishment sets objectives and is only interested in certain categories of individuals.

Even if private establishments contribute to producing quality products, this service, which is not free, is reserved for a category of people without discrimination and for a limited number of students to achieve specific objectives. At the level of public establishments we will be interested in a larger number of individuals because it is necessary to apply a government policy which extends over a broader spectrum in order to meet the needs of the populations. The poor quality of results in certain public establishments can be explained by overstaffed, poor student monitoring, laxity in discipline, a shortage of teachers, poor or almost non-existent remuneration, but especially not at the level of the quality of those who provide the knowledge even if there may be exceptional cases. 

Since the State cannot contain everything, in addition to private and public establishments there exists among others another category of learning environment better known under the name of "evening classes" reserved for other categories of individuals who for various reasons are unable or no longer able to take morning classes or no longer meet the necessary conditions to enrol in private and even public establishments. In short, everything is done so that those who want to have quality training are satisfied according to their means or the sacrifices they are ready to make to achieve their goal.

As the population increases the demand for staff also increases. Each of the categories of learning environment gives its share of contribution in the formation of quality human capital according to the objectives it has set to contribute to the good of the whole. The selection criteria are different but the objectives are generally the same, namely: to provide quality education and above all the desire for learners and students to do the same later for those who choose to become a teacher.

A student who has a baccalaureate in Cameroon and who is accepted into a higher establishment in Europe or elsewhere will not be required to repeat the baccalaureate. The same goes for those who choose to do a master’s degree outside. The quality of the standards or the reputation of the establishment does not matter. What matters most is the quality of the education provided and the means implemented to optimize this quality at the local level. 

Cameroon needs quality products and the establishments offer training that everyone obtains according to their means to give themselves the means to have the best possibilities of obtaining a job or a qualification. The collective of managers and teachers of a primary, secondary or higher education establishment, as well as their pupils and students, give the best of themselves to obtain a finished product useful for society. The objective is to produce the best possible in a world where we give more priority to those we consider to be the best and where those we consider not to be, or at least to be, but to a lower scale, are just as useful.

Everyone is served and obtains results according to their intellectual abilities, what they want, and according to their financial means. All establishments use stratagems to attract particular targets likely to fulfil particular tasks which is not limited only to what I know but which above all takes into account what I can do and what I must not do. And for this, establishments are reinventing themselves on a daily basis in order to provide superior and competitive quality education which will allow locals not to envy the privileges of others in the sense of believing that it is only by being in certain standing that success can be achieved but being satisfied with what we have because those who give their time to provide what pupils or students come to look for do not want to contribute to producing poor quality products but something good even with very little means.

But being content with what we have does not mean condoning injustices. if in fact one day access to a primary school in Cameroon will truly be free as stipulated in Decree No. 2001/041 of February 19, 2001 on the organization of public schools and responsibilities of those responsible for school administration⁵, it is initially at the level of the most remote regions that the positive effects of such a decree should begin to be really perceptible because when we talk about free education we should not only limit ourselves to the level of tuition fees but also take into account exam fees, uniforms, access to textbooks and computer materials, and an additional contribution to that provided by parents in order to encourage teachers in their daily efforts.

Parents must be demanding when it comes to the education of their children. They should not only worry about the fact that there is a school nearby and that they should enrol their children there, but behave as true shareholders of an establishment that cannot function well without them. This is why there are parents-students associations. They must contribute to ensuring that the remuneration of teachers is of quality as well as the teaching provided.

If we have to accept that the Cameroonian education system is doing well, we will have to start by seeing the progressive and effective resolution of all the problems posed by primary, secondary and higher education teachers. We will have to start by seeing quality and well-maintained public establishments in the cities as well as in the villages with quality technical platforms. All the acts of embezzlement and hypocrisy that have paralyzed this system for decades will have to be resolved because apart from that, nothing concretely explains why certain teachers have never received a salary after dozens years and for others until their death when they were integrated into the public service.  Improving the quality of the education system in Cameroon is first and foremost a question of political will and loyalty. The solutions that the State is proposing today should be effective and continue without interruption. We cannot just say on the basis of good resolutions that everything is fine and that everything will be fine. We will need to be more able to match words with actions.

The quality of the infrastructure of a public establishment must reflect not only the teachers there and the quality of the courses taught there. If there is in fact nothing to say about the quality of teaching in public and some private establishments and even about the quality of teachers, the dismal conditions in which some work coupled with derisory, sporadic and almost non-existent salaries leave one desire. Furthermore, there is no longer any doubt that the acts of embezzlement of the past have paralyzed the Cameroonian education system. If to enrol a child in a school it is necessary to pay a certain sum of money, we should already begin to clearly notify this officially by bringing it to the attention of public opinion rather than making the ostrich by saying that this is not permitted while everyone knows that there are educational establishments in Cameroon where to be recognized as a student without taking into account the registration fees required to be paid obligatorily one must pay between 50,000 and 100,000 CFA francs to secure a place.

The environment conducive to good learning is not only found abroad or in well-equipped local establishments is an affirmation that arises from the completion of a long process of concrete implementation of necessary infrastructure and means aiming to prove in a palpable way that what is done elsewhere can also be achieve at home. Indeed, at a time when technology is constantly evolving, allowing remote communications, video conferences and others, others are still in a situation where the further you are from big cities, the further you are from quality training. Some teachers choose not even to go to certain regions or places of assignment not for lack of financial means but because these are places which are not attractive and where the fact of working there is assimilated for some a form of punishment given the lamentable state of working conditions when it is quite simply the law of supply and demand which would like that we spread knowledge everywhere even if working conditions are unfortunately difficult and require even more efforts from the government, municipalities and regional councils. Whether in health or education for example, the number of professionals has always been insufficient and we have to make do with what we have to produce something good and appreciable which normally should improve with time.

Students from the most remote corners also have the right to dream. The creation of private and even public institutes in certain departments or districts far from certain regional capitals show that everything is possible when there is the will and that everything is not just a question of financial means. Even if there are privileges that we can consider to be better than others, quality training is possible and is even a reality everywhere but with the only difference that some States invest more than others in training of quality human resources. The difference both nationally and internationally therefore lies in the quality of the results and the particular details on which certain establishments in particular will choose to place greater emphasis. An education system is always a reflection of the quality of fruits it produces. The quality of training that we provide always corresponds to the quality of the service that will be provided afterwards. Knowledge, know-how and know-being go hand in hand. All levels of standing take this into consideration, but it is especially those who give the best of themselves to give and acquire them properly who will make the difference.

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References

[1] 250 millions d’enfants non-scolarisés: ce qu’il faut savoir sur les dernières données de l’UNESCO en matière d’éducation

[2] Je suis à 23 ans de carrière sans salaire – enseignante au Cameroun

[3] How to Use a Beaker in the Lab?

[4] A Stronger Private Sector Can Boost Growth And Create More Jobs in Cameroon-World Bank group Report

[5] décret n° 2001/041 du 19 Février 2001 portant organisation des établissements scolaires publiques et attributions des responsables de l’administration scolaire

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