Cameroon's Ministry of Basic Education has ordered the closure of 803 primary schools deemed clandestine or non-compliant, weeks before the school year that starts on 7 September. The decision, set out in a letter from minister Laurent Serge Etoundi Ngoa dated 10 August, hits the Centre region hardest, with 191 closures there alone.
The grounds: classrooms set up in homes, sheds or derelict sites, teaching that ignores official curriculum standards, and the circulation of forged creation, opening or extension orders. Several of these schools had operated for years, collecting fees, without ever securing authorisation.
The government paired the sanction with a freeze: for three renewable months, no application to create a private primary school will be received or processed. It is a bid to regain control of a sector whose growth has slipped its grip — 326 clandestine primary schools recorded in 2022-2023, 494 the following year, 722 targeted for closure in 2024, 803 this year.
The Ministry of Secondary Education has tightened the screw in the same way on its own turf, with a run of closure orders signed this summer against private secondary schools in breach of the rules.
That brings back the question parents' associations raise every year: where will the already-enrolled children go? The closures land once families have paid fees, bought supplies and closed a back-to-school budget already strained by the cost of living. No plan to reassign pupils to public schools or to compliant private ones has been made public.
On paper, the 2004 and 2008 education framework laws set precise conditions for opening a school. In practice, the clean-up starts over every year because informal private schooling absorbs demand that the saturated public system does not take: as long as that shortage of places holds, back-room schools reopen elsewhere under another name.
