Building resilience for students despite uncertain times in Cameroon

Building resilience in the community is BERUDA’s specialty. This is crucial for communities suffering from the effects of poverty, but even more important when communities suffer from disturbances like the crisis in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon that placed students in a blockade. Students have not been in school since November 2016 and for students that didn’t have relatives in the South to travel to, they stay on in the school zone and are vulnerable to unhealthy lifestyles and risky behaviors that can impact students' long term outlook for success. 

In order for the BERUDA orphans as well as other vulnerable children to emerge stronger and more resourceful from this crisis, BERUDA came out with the initiative to organise a computer training program. Restricted by the number of computers available at BERUDA, eight students was the maximum we were able to enrol and these were staggered in two intakes.

The first four graduated on the 14th of August 2017 after going through almost 9 months training on Computer software like Microsoft applications, Outlook and other contemporary applications. They underwent a one month internship program and were finally evaluated to deserve diplomas. Hoping that schools resume in September, we believe that these students will go back to school richer in experience than they would have been if schools were ongoing. 

At this point, we will continue with the last set of four but hope to continue the classes even after schools resume. In this way, the single mothers and other non-students in our target population will benefit from the training. Our only problem is the Computers on which they students can practise. We have just two computers and we can therefore carry just a small number of students. If we were able to afford additional computers, we could meet a wider number of beneficiaries.

The four successful graduate students of BERUDA's computing course.