FAQ’s

General

How do you ensure all the funds go directly to the project?

Our charity is run by a group of volunteer trustees who take no salary, who work from home and who meet all their own expenses. No charges are made for the administration of Building Schools for Africa.

How do you know that the projects are effective?

Each project is costed in detail by our partner in Cameroon. These budgets are sent to our supporters/funders and as soon as the funds are received into our account, every penny is forwarded to our partner NGO in Cameroon – and work on the project commences.

Do you operate in other African countries?

We only work in Cameroon. This is because we are a very small charity and we have the advantage of a trusted in-country partner NGO, SHUMAS. It has a proven track record of working with transparency and total honesty and providing excellent value for money and we’ve been happy to partner with them for over 17 years.

Where in Cameroon do you operate?

Whilst we have had a strong focus on the anglophone regions, where SHUMAS started, they now have offices all over Cameroon and we have delivered many projects in all 10 regions of the country.

Schools

How much does it cost to build a school?

A primary school project (three furnished classrooms, an office/store, a Ventilated Pit Latrine with handwashing facilities, investment in a school garden etc.) would cost approximately £27,000.

A secondary school project with the same, or similar, facilities but larger classrooms would cost approximately £35,000.

These costs can be scaled up or down according to the number of classrooms required.

Why doesn’t the government pay for the schools to be built?

Cameroon is a very large country with a long history of having been colonised by various European countries – Portugal, Germany, France and England. It became independent in the 1960s, with eight of the ten regions being Francophone and the remaining two being Anglophone. The transition to independence has not been easy and investment in infrastructure like roads and schools has suffered. The population has increased significantly and there is now a much greater expectation that every child should have access to education. The Government does not have sufficient money to build all the schools required, so communities try to build their own.

Quite often we have found that, in communities where we have built three classrooms at a school, the Government will add another two or three classrooms later on.

Who provides the teachers?

The Cameroon government provides some of the teachers – including the head teacher – and the Parent Teacher Association at each school employs additional teachers using the money accrued from the PTA levy that every child at the school is required to pay. At primary school level, the PTA teachers are often untrained and quite often they do not receive regular payment for months on end. Occasionally they will receive food, grown on the school farm, in lieu of payment. At secondary school level, the number of trained teachers provided by the government is much higher.

Who provides the teaching materials?

Government provides very few teaching materials. The Parent Teachers Association (PTA) often buys necessary books and parents are expected to buy books too. Teachers often share textbooks and lessons are written out in longhand on the blackboards.

What contribution do the communities have to make?

The communities are required to mould 3,000 sun-dried mud bricks per classroom (if the local soil is suitable for this purpose), provide all the stone and sand required for the foundations, all the timber for the roof, doors and window shutters and all the unskilled labour needed to complete the project. They also have to provide accommodation and food for SHUMAS’ expert workers for the duration of the project.

Humanitarian response

How has your work been affected by the war in Cameroon?

As the war intensified, entire villages were burned out across the two regions, with many Cameroonians killed. Many IDPs fled the violence and set up communities in hard-to-reach forest areas and others moved to shanty towns within other cities in the francophone areas, in order to escape the horrors of war.

Despite the extremely dangerous situation, SHUMAS has been able to access these isolated and destitute communities and ascertain their needs. With our focus still clearly on children being able to access education.

What is the war in Cameroon about?

Known as the Anglophone crisis, the war between the government and separatist fighters has been active since 2019.

What began in 2016 as peaceful protests by Anglophone lawyers and teachers against the central government’s placement of French-speaking judges and teachers in English-speaking courts and schools, including a systematic erosion of Anglophone Common Law procedures, deteriorated into a violent conflict and humanitarian disaster after the government used disproportionate force. President Paul Biya’s military is now battling armed separatists, including opportunistic bandits, while civilians are helplessly caught in the crossfire.

The lawlessness includes a multitude of war crimes: indiscriminate shooting, burning, mutilating, torturing, kidnapping for ransom, and raping unarmed civilians. Hospitals, schools, humanitarian aid, humanitarian workers, and an airplane have all been targeted.

Separatists demand that the Northwest and Southwest regions (previously a UK colony) become a new country called “Ambazonia,” and they are using increasingly violent methods and higher levels of weaponry.

What is an Internally Displaced Person (IDP)?

Internally displaced people (IDPs) are people who have been forced to flee their homes because of conflict, violence, persecution or disasters, however, unlike refugees, they remain within their own country. According to the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) by June 2023 there were over one million IDPs in Cameroon.

Since the start of the Anglophone Crisis in 2016, an estimated 841,500 children have been forced out of school in the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon.

As the crisis escalated into war, there has been massive displacement of people to the relatively peaceful urban areas of Bamenda, Buea and other cities in the francophone regions. According to the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Aid (August 2021) 52% of these displaced people are women and 44.5% are children (86,472 girls and 95,031 boys).

Is it safe for you and your team to operate in the areas of war?

The areas of conflict are confined to specific areas in the Northwest and Southwest regions which we have been unable to visit for a number of years. We take advice from SHUMAS who manage our logistics on the ground as to areas which are safe for us to visit. Large parts of the country are safe and we’re able to visit most projects without any challenges.

Health and water

Why do you build health centres and water projects?

Our main focus has always been on increasing access to school for all children in Cameroon, we quickly realised that children were only able to attend school if their whole family was in good health – otherwise they would be kept back at home to work the farm and keep the family fed. In these cases, family income would fall so low that the payment of health centre charges and school fees would be impossible.

Health centres in the remote villages are desperately poor and unhygienic places with little or no equipment. Many women have no antenatal care and consult ‘traditional healers’ when there are problems. This results in high infant and maternal mortality and many live births do not get registered, leaving these children disenfranchised for the rest of their lives.

We have also been able to fund new community water projects, providing access to clean drinking water to whole communities, including schools, in areas which are very susceptible to water borne diseases like malaria, typhoid and cholera.

How much does it cost to refurbish a health centre?

It costs approximately £15,000 to rebuild or refurbish a health centre that already exists.

How much does it cost to provide equipment for a health centre?

It costs approximately £8,500 to equip a centre with essential equipment.

How much does it cost to build a water source?

Currently these borehole projects cost £9,000