Cameroon ambassador spreads education message to youth development group

One of A World at School’s Global Youth Ambassadors is helping to get the education message across in Cameroon.

Fideline Mboringong held an advocacy training workshop in Yaounde for staff of the Trinity Foundation – an organisation that helps to transform the lives of underprivileged young people including orphans and street children by holding recreational seminars and workshops to uncover their talents. 

The objective of the workshop was to tell Trinity Foundation about A World at School’s goals and activities, the #EducationCountdown campaign and advocacy skills.

Trinity founder Alex Folen opened the workshop and then Fideline outlined the Millennium Development Goal to give all children a primary education by the end of 2015 – and told them tat and the 58 million children are still out of school.

The participants were asked how they could support #EducationCountdown. Their ideas included:

• Identifying areas that need attention and then engaging with those communities
• Identifying activities of interest to the target population and using that to spread the word on the need for education
• Partnering with local organisations and councils
• Creating or working with education clubs in schools
• Identifying and contacting key parliamentarians who are passionate about education
• Putting up posters with catchy slogans in schools and communities on the importance of education and the campaign

Then followed a presentation on advocacy and strategies sich as lobbying, mobilising and communicating. High rates of illiteracy on some rural areas of Cameron was identified as a key problem.

At the end of the workshop, it was agreed that:

• Staff will get actively involved in the #EducationCountdown campaign online
• They will work to enrol at least one child in school during the countdown
• They will work with international and local NGOs and government offficials to push the idea of education, especially for girls, and primary education for all
• They will work with cultural groups to break down barriers and make education friendly
• They will organise seminars and educational sensitisation campaigns to educate the public on the importance of elementary education

Fideline said: “One of the striking issues about the seminar was the responsiveness of the Trinity Foundation staff and the collaboration that was actually built between them and me.

“With this atmosphere of co-operation, we agreed to work together in harnessing resources towards attaining the Millennium Development Goal set by world leaders. We will equally make education, especially primary education and education for girls, our priority.”