DEVELOPMENT BULLETIN-CAMEROON: Breaking The Cycle Of Poverty

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Tansa Musa

DJINGLIYA, CAMEROON, May 9 1998 (IPS) - In a thatched hut here, a group of 25 students sit on mats spread on the floor. This hut, known here as “boukarou”, is where the children of Djingliya, a remote village situated in the Mandara Mountains in Cameroon’s F ar North Province, go to school.

The hut is, in essence, an adult literacy centre established in December 1997. Most of the students here, aged between 15 and 19, are still being introduced to the ABC’s.

The school, run by a lone teacher, Partaye Mogouden, has been established by European Union (EU) assistance to break the cycle of poverty in the region.

The region, situated on the border with Nigeria, is home to some one million impoverished peasants, who eke a living out of an arid, rough and rocky environment.

Here, poverty is glaring, and the desperate villagers hunt for narrow space and cracks between rocks to plant a grain of millet. Rainfall is scarce, only three to four months in the year. The rest of the period is dry.

Malnutrition, especially among children, is rampant. Despite their weak physical conditions, the children, who at a tender age are trained to adapt to the reality of the harsh life here, compete in carrying stones for the construction of the village well .

The village girls and women, some with babies strapped to their backs, make the unenviable rounds to and from a neighbouring village, carrying water, while the men, dig the ground to sink a well, sweating profusely in the hot sun.

Experts estimate that the rate of illiteracy in parts of the region is upwards of 90 percent.

In a bid to tackle the crisis, the EU signed an agreement with the government of Cameroon in 1994, culminating in the setting up of an agency called the ‘Projects for the Development of the Mounts Mandara Region’ (PDRM), to help the villagers.

The four-year project, which began in 1996, is financed to the tune of six billion CFAs from the resources of the European Development Fund (EDF). The main activities of the project will be providing the zone with water, which has been identified as the major problem, social infrastructure (classrooms), rural roads and rural development.

“Our basic working principle,” says Frederich Nagel, Rural Development adviser to the European Commission Delegate in Cameroon, “is to support activities where there is a real need and for which priority has been expressed by the people themselves, wh o must guarantee to us their active participation.”

The EU’s goal is partnership. Under the partnership, it has already achieved the construction of classrooms and a pit latrine at the adjacent Singo Maksah village. The contributions of the local population came in the form of sand, stones and labour, whi le the project provided technical and financial assistance.

By the time it was completed, the local contribution was valued at 20 percent of the total cost, while the PDRM provided 80 percent.

The EU has also constructed some 50 classrooms as well as 66 adult literacy centres for 1,650 persons, most of them women and young girls. Twenty-five more classrooms will be completed by June.

As part of their outdoor activities, pupils in 11 schools have also planted a total of 4000 trees in a bid “to inculcate in the children the principle of environmental protection” and of fighting desert encroachment.

The EU expects that by June, some 66 kilometres of roads in the region would have either been maintained or built.

“The most important obstacle we have is to overcome the lack of water. Our target is to increase water supply,” says EU’s Leunda Martiarena.

The PDRM says it will build four major dams, 600 small water retaining dams along river beds to develop pools and help raise underground water level and sink 150 wells. It expects to complete constructing the first batch of 160 small dams by the end of J une.

The local population welcome the EU assistance. They accuse their local legislators of allegedly pocketing a total of CFA 8 million every year meant for development in their respective constituencies.

“We only see them here at the time of elections when they come to ask for our votes. After that, they disappear to live in glass palaces in town,” says a secondary school student here.