For decades, the North-West Region stood proudly as the strongest place of Anglo-Saxon education. The region produced the highest numbers of candidates for the General Certificate of Education, GCE, and many of the country’s best results came from schools in Bamenda, Kumbo, Bambili, Nkambe, Fundong, Wum and other towns.
Schools such as Sacred Heart College Mankon, Our Lady of Lourdes College Mankon, Presbyterian Secondary School Mankon, Saker Baptist College, Bishop Rogan College and several Government Bilingual High Schools became symbols of academic excellence. Parents made enormous sacrifices to send their children to school because education was widely regarded as the surest path to a better future.
Today, however, the picture appears painfully different.
Statistics circulating on the 2026 GCE Advanced Level results have reopened an uncomfortable debate about the impact of nearly a decade of armed conflict on education in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions. According to the figures, among the 114 candidates who reportedly obtained five subjects with the maximum score of 25 points, the top students who used to come from schools in the North-West and South-West Regions were visibly absent. More strikingly, no traditional School in Anglophone Cameroon was reportedly represented among the top 20 candidates.
If these figures are accurate, they should concern every Cameroonian.
This is not simply about examination rankings. It is about a generation of children whose education has been repeatedly interrupted by a conflict they neither started nor chose.
Since the beginning of the Anglophone crisis, schools have become victims of violence, fear and political confrontation. Thousands of children have experienced school closures, lockdowns, attacks, threats and prolonged disruptions to the academic calendar. Teachers have been threatened, schools burnt or abandoned, and parents have often been forced to choose between the education and safety of their children.
While several actors bear responsibility for the suffering caused by the crisis, armed separatist groups must confront the devastating consequences of their actions against education.
A struggle that claims to defend the future of Anglophone people cannot justify denying Anglophone children access to education.
There is no liberation in keeping a child out of the classroom.
There is no freedom in threatening teachers.
There is no victory in burning schools.
And there can be no meaningful future for any society when its children are prevented from acquiring the knowledge and skills needed to build that future.
The painful irony is that while children in the conflict-hit regions have lost precious years of learning, many other Cameroonian children have continued their education uninterrupted. The result is an emerging educational gap that could have consequences for decades.
A child who misses one academic year may struggle to catch up. A child who misses several years may never return to school. Some have been pushed into idleness, drugs, criminality and other forms of vulnerability. The longer this continues, the greater the danger of producing a generation deprived of the opportunities that education provides.
The North-West and South-West once competed academically with the best regions and schools in Cameroon. Today, the conversation is increasingly about how to prevent their educational system from falling further behind.
This should be a moment of serious reflection.
Those who continue to enforce school disruptions in the name of a political struggle must ask themselves a simple question: -What kind of future are we fighting for if the children who are supposed to inherit that future are denied an education?
The children of the North-West and South-West cannot be sacrificed indefinitely on the altar of political disagreement and armed confrontation.
It is time to return education to its rightful place: above politics, above conflict and beyond the reach of guns.
Parents must continue to encourage their children to go to school. Communities must protect educational institutions. Religious and traditional leaders must speak loudly against all forms of violence targeting schools. And armed groups must understand that every day a child is prevented from learning is another day stolen from the future of the very people they claim to represent.
The North-West was once an educational powerhouse. There is no reason it cannot rise again.
But that recovery will begin with one fundamental decision: let the children go to school.
The greatest weapon against ignorance, poverty and hopelessness has never been the gun.
It has always been education.
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