Cameroon’s school year begins on Monday. In the country’s two English-speaking regions, the UN recorded more than 88 attacks on education in the first six months of this year.

The International Crisis Group warned on Wednesday that violence recorded during August could disrupt the reopening in the North-West and South-West.

This is the tenth school year the conflict has interfered with, and it is barely reported outside Cameroon.

Why schools specifically

Most conflicts damage education incidentally. This one targets it deliberately, and the reason is in the origins of the dispute.

The crisis began in 2016 when English-speaking lawyers and teachers protested against what they described as the imposition of French-language legal and educational systems on regions that had inherited British institutions. The grievance was, from the start, partly about schools.

After the protests were suppressed and separatists declared an independent “Ambazonia” in 2017, armed groups imposed a boycott of government schooling. Attending a state school became, in their framing, an act of submission to the government they are fighting. Schools have been burned, teachers threatened and abducted, and students attacked.

The Cameroonian government’s position is that education is a right and a state responsibility, and it has pushed reopening as evidence of returning normality. Separatist groups have periodically relaxed the boycott under pressure from Anglophone civil society, which has consistently argued that depriving children of school harms the community the separatists claim to represent.

Both sides therefore have an interest in what happens on the first day of term, which is precisely what makes it dangerous.

The scale, in figures

The conflict has killed more than 6,500 people since 2017 and displaced over a million. European Commission humanitarian figures put displacement within the two Anglophone regions above 580,000, with more than 76,000 Cameroonians sheltering in Nigeria.

For 2026, an estimated 933,000 school-age children across the North-West, South-West and Far North require emergency education support. In the first quarter, education partners reached 37 per cent of what was already a reprioritised target — meaning the goal had been cut before they fell short of it.

OCHA’s most recent regional report describes repeated waves of forced displacement in Donga Mantung, Bui and Menchum divisions, entire villages temporarily deserted, and a shrinking humanitarian presence constrained by funding. That last phrase is the one to hold onto: the response is contracting while the conflict is not.

What ten years does to a cohort

An unusual piece of evidence surfaced last month in Cameroon’s own examination results.

Reporting on the 2026 GCE Advanced Level results noted that among candidates achieving the top scores, schools from the North-West and South-West were absent — regions that once competed with the best in the country, and which built their reputation on precisely this examination system.

Examination rankings are a crude measure and should not be over-read. But they are a measure, produced by the state, of something that is otherwise very hard to quantify: what happens to a generation when schooling is interrupted for the better part of a decade in one part of a country and not in another.

Cameroonian commentators have made the obvious point that a child who misses one year may catch up and a child who misses several may not return at all. That gap does not close when a conflict ends. It follows the cohort through working life.

The same week, in two countries

Cameroon’s reopening falls days after schools reopened across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where teachers in the Ebola epicentre had asked for a postponement and were overruled.

The parallel is worth drawing because the underlying decision is identical. A government weighs the certain, cumulative harm of children not being in school against an acute risk on the day they return, and chooses the school year. Whether that is courage or recklessness depends entirely on what happens next, and nobody knows in advance.

What distinguishes Cameroon is duration. The DRC is managing a four-month outbreak. Cameroon is entering year ten.

Why nobody covers it

The Anglophone crisis has the features that reliably produce silence: no oil, no great-power interest, no spillover into Europe, a government that restricts access, and a violence pattern of small recurring incidents rather than single large ones.

It also lacks a simple moral shape. Both government forces and separatist groups have been credibly accused of atrocities against civilians, which makes the story harder to tell than one with an obvious aggressor — and, in our experience, considerably less likely to be told at all.

What to watch

Attendance in the first week, and whether the number of attacks on education in the second half of this year exceeds the 88 recorded in the first. Both figures exist. Neither will make international news unless something happens on a scale that makes the number irrelevant.

Sources

• International Crisis Group monthly conflict monitoring report, 2 September 2026
• UN OCHA, Cameroon North-West and South-West Situation Report No. 85
• European Commission humanitarian aid country profile, Cameroon
• Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Cameroon country page
• Cameroonian press reporting on the 2026 GCE Advanced Level results