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The Republic of Cameroon (République de Cameroun) is a unitary, constitutional democracy located in western Central Africa. Bordered by the Atlantic Ocean's Bight (bay) of Biafra to the southwest, Lake Chad to the northwest, Nigeria and Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Congo (Brazzaville) to the south, Cameroon measure…
Cameroon is a republic with a strong presidency largely directing Cameroonian civil and political life. The country's current Constitution was approved by referendum on May 20, 1972, and adopted June 2 of that year. The Cameroonian legal system is a civil law system based on the French system of justice, with some influence from the common law system of the British. All Cameroonians, women …
In 1999, approximately 81 percent of adult men fifteen years of age or older were estimated to be literate, as were almost 69 percent of adult women. This represented a significant improvement over conditions in 1995, when only about 63 percent of the Cameroonian population was estimated to be literate—approximately 75 percent of adult men and a little more than 52 percent women, based on U…
Participation rates declined dramatically in preprimary, primary, and secondary education programs in the second half of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, with somewhat erratic ups and downs in school attendance from one year to the next. In his 1996 critique of schooling and democratic development (or lack of development) in Africa, Ambroise Kom wrote that descolarisation (de-schooling) had rap…
In the French-speaking parts of Cameroon in 2000, students generally attended secondary schools between the ages of twelve and nineteen. Four years were spent at the lower-secondary level and three at the upper-secondary level, with the Brevet d'Etudes du premier Cycle awarded to students graduating after the four grades of General Secondary school in the Francophone system (Collège …
In 1995 the gross enrollment rate for higher education in Cameroon was only 4 percent, with significant gender disparities: 7 percent of males and only 1 percent of females of higher-education age were enrolled in tertiary-level education and training programs. By 1998 enrollments had increased and were almost equivalent to what they had been before the higher education budget was trimmed in 1993.…
The Ministry of National Education has primary responsibility for overseeing the implementation of educational laws, decrees, and policy in Cameroon's primary and secondary schools and for developing administrative regulations pertaining to basic education. The Ministry of Higher Education is responsible for developing and monitoring training and educational program offerings past the secon…
Cameroon lacked a well-developed system of adult education in the late 1990s. Nonetheless, at that time recommendations were being made to develop new educational opportunities for adults seeking to upgrade their skills, learn a new trade, or change jobs. Because computer training was seen as absolutely necessary to increase the marketability of graduates of training and education programs by the …
The people of the Republic of Cameroon have experienced a very erratic course of educational development in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Whereas school enrollments had reached admirable levels in comparison to many other sub-Saharan African countries by the early 1980s, economic crises in Cameroon in the middle of that decade spoiled the country's promising educational per…
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