Cameroon builds schools for students displaced by Boko Haram

Cameroon has launched an $8 million emergency plan to construct 200 classrooms, dormitories and latrines for 70,000 students displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency. The schools will be constructed in safer localities in Cameroon, away from the volatile northern region near the Nigerian border.

Midjiyawa Bakari, the governor of the far north region of Cameroon, said school children were displaced from 170 schools destroyed by Boko Haram fighters on Cameroon's border with Nigeria. He sad schools in safer Cameroonian localities can no longer accommodate the increasing numbers or students and he has given out contracts for classrooms, latrines and dormitories to be built.

He said he has given the contracts to credible businessmen who can complete the work in 40 days so the children can go back to school.

Businessman Ngeh Foncha, who is to supply the schools with electricity, said the government has facilitated their work by reducing administrative bottlenecks in procurement processes.

He said that as of Friday they will start transporting electricity cables and poles to the construction sites. He thinks 80 percent of the work will be complete within three weeks.

The government has already deployed the military to the selected sites. Cameroon's Far North delegate of basic education, Ibrahim Joel Mahamat, said nearly half of the children displaced are primary school students.

He said he is very optimistic that very soon the 33,000 children displaced from primary schools on Cameroon's northern border with Nigeria will have good classrooms so they can study in safer localities.

The displaced school children are among the 150 000 people who have been chased out of their homes since the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram started attacking Cameroon in its fight to create an Islamist caliphate.