The Ministry of Basic Education (Minedub) plans to regularize the situation of more than one million children currently enrolled in primary schools without birth certificates.
The initiative will be financed under the Cameroon Education Reform Support Program (Parec), supported by the World Bank. “The World Bank has once again authorized the inclusion in the 2025 budget of Parec, of a line of credit to settle the stock of approximately 1.4 million children without birth certificates attending primary school,” indicates the Ministry of Basic Education. Although the exact amount of this line of credit has not been specified, it is an integral part of the annual budgeted work plan of Parec for the 2025 financial year, which amounts to 32.265 billion FCFA. The ministry specified that this initiative is part of the continuity of the special operation of establishing birth certificates for children in CM2 and Class 6 which “was a great success in 2024”.
In an initiative aimed at facilitating access to end-of-year exams for thousands of students, Minedub, in collaboration with the World Bank and the Ministry of Justice, launched a special operation to issue birth certificates from April 1 to 30, 2024. This operation aimed to issue birth certificates to 80,000 students in CM2 (French-speaking subsystem) and Class 6 (English-speaking subsystem), who were at risk of not being able to take their exams due to lack of this essential document. This initiative enabled these students to register for the Certificat d’études primaire (CEP) and First School Leaving Certificate (FSLC) exams, diplomas marking the end of primary education in the French-speaking and English-speaking subsystems. To ensure the success of this operation, Minedub exceptionally extended the deadline for submitting applications for these exams, allowing students to obtain their birth certificates on time. Instead of the end of February (the official annual deadline), students were given an exemption and were able to register until the end of April 2024. This flexibility was welcomed by the World Bank, which stressed the importance of this approach for the regularization of unregistered children.
PAREC, launched in 2019 and scheduled to run until 2026, aims to support the government’s reforms in the education and training sector. This program covers a multitude of initiatives, ranging from the recruitment and training of teachers to the distribution of school textbooks, the development of school loans in rural areas and support for refugees. The regularization of the civil status of children without birth certificates is one of these essential structural reforms. It is part of a broader desire by the government to strengthen Cameroon’s education system and guarantee access to education for all children.
SBBC