We are thrilled to be able to announce that a couple of our supporters have offered to fund another school building project this year. It will take place at a small village called Peere, in the Adamawa Region. Until recently the school (Ecole Publique parent de...
It was very exciting and encouraging to see how the community has come out to help on this project - our biggest school building project to date. This is Participatory Development at its very best! The ground floor construction (three classrooms) is now complete and...
Building Schools For Africa 2008 - 2023 Building Schools for Africa started as an idea in 2007 when Marianne (founding trustee of BSFA) came home from Cameroon with tales of a small rural community called Ntseimbang which was desperately in need of a school. She had...
Once again, with support from our funders, we have been able to help impoverished women who are the lone heads of households, establish livelihoods for themselves and thus be able to feed their families and send their children to school. This year we have been able...
Almost one year to the day that the new classrooms and office were handed over to the community in the village of Sogum in Cameroon's Far North Region, a team from the SHUMAS office in Maroua visited to assess the impact of the project. We are pleased to say that the...
There is a small plot of land behind St Paul's Catholic church in Ntahteka, Bamenda, which will soon be home to our most ambitious school project yet. When our trustees visited this school in January 2023, over 300 children from the local area were squeezed into small...
Ecole Publique Kodek is situated in a village about 7 Kms from Maroua, the capital of the Far North Region of Cameroon. The school currently has 800 pupils enrolled but it has not had a supply of clean drinking water - until now! This small project, costing just...
23rd November 2023 was a day of great celebration in Kongola - a rural village in the sub-division of Maroua III in the Far North of Cameroon - as three new classrooms, an office and a new latrine (funded by BSFA and constructed by SHUMAS) were being handed over to...
Many thanks to everyone who supported us during the Big Give Christmas Challenge. With our matched funding, we reached a total of almost £6,000. 100% of this money will go directly to our current projects in Cameroon - the Economic Empowerment for Education...
This year, Building Schools for Africa has linked up with the Big Give Christmas Challenge where modest individual donations to our charity, made between Tuesday November 28th and Tuesday December 5th through the link below, will be matched - up to a total of £6,250. ...
Our partner, SHUMAS, has a new initiative designed to raise awareness in young people about environment issues, and also to improve their carbon footprint. It is called the SHUMAS Healing the Earth Strategy and all projects will now incorporate this message. The...
We were so delighted to learn that the British High Commissioner, Mr. Barry Lowen, was able to visit the Technical High School at Kongola whilst he was in the Far North region recently. CETIC Kongola is our latest school building project, which is due to be handed...
There was great excitement today amongst the 800 children and the teachers at the primary school in Kodek, which is located approximately 7 Kms from Maroua, the capital of the Far North region of Cameroon. A huge drilling rig arrived at the school and started to...
The SHUMAS Rehab Unit at Mile 6 Nkwen, has undergone an major transformation in the past months. For many years it provided training in skills from tailoring to hairdressing, shoe-making to basket weaving for disabled adults who were otherwise unable to earn a living...
The school hall at All Saints Catholic College in Bayelle, Bamenda, was packed with pupils who were buzzing with excitement at the prospect of being able to study in their brand new science lab. The fully equipped lab was handed over to the College in a wonderful...
“ICO's goal is to be the leading international organisation working for peace and reconciliation in divided conflict settings with a special focus on enabling minority communities in these divided settings to participate in the respective peace process.” (James...
Dear amazing Donors BSFA and SHUMAS have just given us the greatest honour of allowing us to come visit Cameroon and see the amazing work that they do. During our trip we travelled all over the country, seeing the potential that the diverse landscape and motivated...
The Far North region is the second most populated region of Cameroon and one of the poorest. The region currently faces immense challenges including weak public services and chronic insecurity caused by armed conflicts by the Boko Haram. The impacts of climate change...
Two sixth-formers recently spent three weeks of their summer holiday working with our partner, SHUMAS, on behalf of Building Schools for Africa. Oby Gompels and Monty Woodward weren't entirely sure what they were letting themselves in for - but they declare they had a...
We are excited to be funding another school building project in the Far North region this year. The school that will be benefitting from a new classroom block, latrine with hand washing facilities and COVID 19 prevention materials is CETIC de Kongola in Maroua 111...
We are excited to announce that work will soon start on a new Science Lab at All Saints Catholic College Bayelle in Bamenda, NW Region. All Saints College was created in 2019 in response to many requests from parents of children who had attended other secondary...
By Oliver Smith In the early 1960s, after gaining independence from France and the UK, Cameroon was considered a place of hope in the central part of Africa, building essential infrastructure such as roads and railways as well as profitable agricultural and petroleum...
“There’s nothing greater than the feeling of helping another human. That's what motivates us.” Stephen Ndzerem, Founder and Director General, SHUMAS At Building Schools for Africa we have always been aware of the effectiveness of our exclusive partnership with...
12th December 2022 was a joyful day in the village of Sogum. After years of having to use straw huts as classrooms, the primary school in the village took ownership of three new properly constructed classrooms and a school office, built by SHUMAS contractors and...
These are the beneficiaries of the Economic Empower for Education project that BSFA trustees met in Yaounde on 28th January 2023. Meriline is 35 years old. She came to Yaounde three years ago with her children aged 13, 10 and 6. She used to live in Kumbo and said she...
When there is war in a country, it is essential for humanitarian agencies to be able to respond quickly to the changing needs of suffering communities and not have their response slowed by needless bureaucracy. Fortunately, our partner in Cameroon, SHUMAS, is expert...
Normally our trustees visit Cameroon every year to monitor progress of our various projects, but this has not been possible in recent years because of the pandemic ... so the trip we made this January was really action-packed with SO MANY projects to visit and people...
It was with mixed feelings that we ventured down into the middle of the town of Bamenda during our trip to Cameroon this year. Bamenda has always been our 'home away from home' since we starting our partnership with SHUMAS, but we haven't been able to go there since...
During our visit to Cameroon we met just some of the 100 IDP women that we have helped our partner, SHUMAS, to train in small business management. The women were then each given start up materials, to the value of 50,000 CFAs (£65) to get their businesses started. In...
Kindness Shaye is a 28 year old single mother of three children, aged 12, 10 and 7. She was physically abused by the father of the children who finally abandoned them and, because of the intense violence of the political crisis in her home village of Ndu, she fled...
Last year we helped SHUMAS to launch a new initiative aimed at teenage boys and girls from the NW region, who had been forced to drop out of school early because of the war. Most of these children had lost family members, some had signed up as child soldiers, many of...
Please read all about what we have achieved in partnership with Shumas Cameroon over the past six months. 2022 Summer newsletter
Whilst SHUMAS staff were busy implementing the Humanitarian Aid project at the IDP communities in Fungom, they were approached by many of the community leaders who begged them to try to find some way of getting their children back to school. They were desperate. All...
This year we funded SHUMAS to undertake its biggest humanitarian aid project so far. 506 households – a total of 3050 Internally Displaced People - had been identified as being in dire need of humanitarian assistance in the Fungom district of Menchum Division in the...
Spotted by our intrepid trustee from the Midlands, Andrew Hindle. The Cameroon flag and team taking part in the rehearsal for the Opening Ceremony for the Commonwealth Games. Welcome to England - and Good Luck!
It has always been a problem for the poorest people in Cameroon to be able to earn sufficient money to send their children to school - and during the past seven years of war this situation has got worse and worse. The majority of the 3000+ anglophones who have been...
Andrew Hindle and his family have been supporting this charity for the past ten years, during which time, they have raised funds for the construction of three primary schools, two school water supplies and the upgrading of a rural health centre. Their fundraising has...
It's not an easy task for our partners at SHUMAS, to find a suitable school project for our funders and then bring it all to completion without any hitches. There can be any number of incidents that can cause a project to have to be abandoned - and the collection of...
Some months ago we reported that the construction of a new classroom block at GBHS Ntui had been started. Close to 900 pupils were already attending this secondary school, including 100 Internally Displaced children, and with only 12 classrooms in the entire school,...
In 2015 we funded the construction of a secondary school building at Sabongari in the NW region and also helped the local heath centre with some new equipment. The community there was thrilled with both projects and the village really started to thrive. However, in...
Our biggest Humanitarian Relief project yet - read about it in our newsletter Please click on the link below to read our newsletter - giving details of what we have achieved since the summer 2022 January newsletter
We recently sent a report to Andrew Hindle, one of our wonderful regular supporters, showing the progress that had been made on the project he and his family had funded. This was his response to us: "Excellent. Yes thank you, I received the report and (it was) really...
It is salutary to note that the recent start of the African Cup of Nations football competition, hosted by Cameroon, has prompted the British media to suddenly show an interest in the five-year long war in that country. The war, between the French-speaking...
We are hoping that our next school project will be underway soon in the village of Njimbong in the Littoral region. This village is very remote in the forest area, 28 Kms from the nearest town of Yabassi. The school was created in 2014. It is the only school in the...
This is our biggest humanitarian aid project yet, in terms of numbers of people who will be helped - and the impact will be huge. SHUMAS has identified 506 IDP households - a total of 3050 people - who are very isolated and vulnerable, living in abject poverty and...
Water is essential for life and in rural Cameroon, it is usually the women and girls who have to collect water each day for the family needs. To have potable water near to their homes saves hours of walking and means more girl children can go to school, so we have...
It has been five years now since all schools in the NW/SW regions of Cameroon were closed because of war. More than 78 of these have been destroyed in the fighting and, although a few are now back functioning again, there are no formal schools open at all in the Bui...
The dry season has arrived at last in Cameroon, and work started immediately on the new classroom block at the Government Bilingual High School in the village of Ntui in the Centre region. The foundations were dug in record time and the groundwork has now been...
Since the political crisis started back in 2016, two primary schools and a nursery school in the village of Bayelle, have joined forces to make one large primary and nursery school with approximately 2,000 pupils and 55 teachers. It has managed to keep functioning...
Our fabulous supporters, the Hindle Family, have been pulling out all the stops again to raise money for a project that is close to their hearts. In 2019, Andrew and Linda and their two children - Amelie and Fraser - travelled to Cameroon to witness the handover of a...
It was so exciting to learn this week that the little primary school at Fungeh is still doing well. When we first visited Fungeh, back in 2008, the school was being held in a crumbling ruin with a meagre thatch roof. The children had a constant battle with rain and...
This brand new school building was handed over to the community at Mindassi in the Central Region in April 2021. It is a marked improvement on the old school building (see pictures below) which had three tiny classrooms for 6 year groups, very few benches and no...
It's the little things in life that mean the most - especially if you haven't been able to go to school for years and you are desperate to catch up! St John's school in Bamenda needed lots of new benches so that the children didn't have to be crowded together in the...
The children in Jakiri have not been able to attend school for more than four years. Almost all schools in the NW Region have been closed because of the socio-politial crisis that has been escalating since 2016, but the children were desperate to get back to...
Reports of high salaries paid to charity staff have recently appeared in the UK press. The highest paid UK charity CEO reportedly earns £4.5 million a year. Salaries over £100k are very common in the UK charity sector. In the light of this the Charity Commission is...
It's just a few more days before children in the UK return to school after two months of having to work from home. Our schools will be prepared with COVID testing facilities and social distancing in place. Imagine what it must be like for these children who have...
At the beginning of 2020, we received a wonderful donation of 21 reconditioned laptops from our supporters at Willmott Dixon. These were destined to be shipped out to Cameroon and distributed to some of our secondary schools there - but unfortunately the pandemic...
Our regular supporters will have received our latest newsletter in their inboxes last week. We hope you all enjoyed reading about all we have achieved over the past six months. If any of you missed it, try checking your Spam files (just in case!) .... or you can have...
Our project to provide emergency humanitarian relief to 1000 of the Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in the hard-to-reach areas wasn't exactly easy to deliver! But our partner, SHUMAS, was as resourceful as ever. Many items, including 400 mattresses and mosquito...
It's hard for most of us living in the West to imagine what it must be like for people who suddenly become IDPs in their own country. This has happened to almost a million Cameroonians in the NW and SW regions simply because they are English speaking, living in...
The St John Nursery and Primary school in Nkwen, NW Region was started by missionaries in 1988. It was always a very popular and busy school until the escalation of the crisis caused all schools in the region to close in 2016. However, it ventured to re-open in...
December 4th 2020 saw the opening of the third purpose-built High School science lab that our charity has been able to fund. This one is at the Government Bilingual High School Bekoko in Littoral Region. The school has just over 1000 students at present, including...
On the night of 11th October 2018, the little village of N'taba in NW Region was attacked by unidentified armed men. The houses were razed to the ground, the villagers' cattle were stolen and the 171 villagers fled, taking nothing with them, to Kourap in the West...
St Odile is the largest Health Centre in Edea, Littoral Region, but it doesn't have clean drinking water and it doesn't have a reliable electricity supply. It sees around 2000 patients annually, including mothers with premature babies from across the whole area. ...
Five years ago, BSFA was able to help the village of Sabongari by funding the construction of a classroom block at their secondary school. The villagers have remained very grateful and good friends of our partner SHUMAS ever since. They heard that SHUMAS was helping...
We are so pleased to be able to announce that the little primary and nursery school, CS Charles Luanga, in Up Station Bamenda will soon have a new school building, complete with furniture and blackboards, a head teacher's office and a new latrine - thanks to a...
We are delighted to have been able to fund the construction of a pop-up school in each of two IDP communities (Nkah and Benakuma) in the forest regions this year, and to provide learning materials for a third community school in the semi-urban community of Chinde. ...
The emergency humanitarian relief project for 1000 Internally Displaced People, which BSFA funded earlier this year, has been such a great success that we are now able to repeat it, on a smaller scale, thanks to additional funds donated by our wonderful supporters....
Many children in the developed countries of the world will be feeling excited and relieved to be getting back to school after six months of being stuck at home because of the Coronavirus. Imagine how the anglophone children in Cameroon must be feeling after almost...
Back in 2015, thanks to our wonderful supporters at Market Makers, we funded some school projects in Mbiame, one of which was the little Nursery School at Ntoh Mbiame. The following year, unfortunately, almost all schools in the NW and SW regions started to close...
Many of the children in the IDP communities in Cameroon are suffering from either Moderate Acute Malnutrition (MAM) or Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) during this period of political unrest. It is very hard for families to get food. Their livelihoods and farms are...
Here are two examples of how practical help can enable children to continue with their education. Nearly all schools in the NW Region have been closed for almost four years, but the teacher training college at Mbengwi has been struggling to keep open as often as...
Since 2016, Bui Division in the NW Region has been particularly hard hit by violence of the Anglophone crisis. This is a Division where, over the years, Building Schools for Africa and SHUMAS have been extremely effective in improving both access to education and the...
We recently received a wonderful donation of 21 reconditioned laptops from Willmott Dixon. These are destined for children in secondary education and will make an enormous difference to their ability to study and pass exams. In Cameroon around 90% of children write...
As if there weren't enough difficulties in Cameroon at the moment, COVID-19 has now arrived and it is spreading quickly. Our partner in Cameroon, SHUMAS, has been quick to respond to this new crisis and is busy getting information about social distancing and how to...
During our trustees' visit to Cameroon in November 2019, we saw at first hand some of the appalling situations of the anglophone Internally Displaced People (IDPs), thousands of whom had fled their homes, farms and businesses in the NW and SW regions in order to...
Thanks to three large donations from supporters, we have very nearly reached our target for the Special Appeal to improve the living conditions of 1000 Internally Displaced People in hard-to-reach communities in the forests and the bush regions of NW & SW...
Our most grateful thanks are due, once again, to the children at the Dragon School in Oxford who recently sent us a second marvellous donation of over £300 towards our projects. Last November, the BSFA trustees who travelled out to Cameroon to hand over our 2019...
This November we were fortunate to have a meeting with the newly appointed Prime Minister of Cameroon, His Excellency Joseph Ngute. His Special Adviser has known of SHUMAS' work with BSFA for many years and he was keen that the Prime Minister should learn more about...
Schools These pictures of old and new school buildings show just some of what we achieved in 2019, thanks to the generous donations of our supporters. New classroom blocks,...
We build new toilets at each of our school projects. They are not fancy by western standards: they are Ventilated Deep Pit Latrines which are divided into cubicles, providig essential privacy - and they are appropriate structures for these rural locations. Each...
Our latest newsletter can be downloaded here Newsletter _ Summer 2019 Update Our emphasis this year, across all our projects, has been to help as many Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Cameroon as possible. We hope you find it an enjoyable and informative read.
This is the kind of makeshift house that thousands of families now call home in the jungle and bush areas of the NW and SW regions of Cameroon. Their villages have been burned, their subsistence farms destroyed, family members killed. They live in fear of their...
The UN has recently announced that the number of anglophones who have become displaced since the start of the political crisis in 2016 has doubled since 2018. There are now a million IDPs from the NW and SW regions of Cameroon - very many of whom have fled to the...
We are so proud and very very happy to announce that our 100th school building project has been completed. The primary school in the village of Konya Mbetta, in the Centre region, is finished and the children are already using their new classrooms. There will be a...