When Africa's first continental Forum on Gender and Child Statistics closed in Yaoundé on July 10 after five days of sessions, INS Director-General Joseph Tedou offered a line that could serve as an epigraph for Central Africa's entire education crisis: "What we do not count, we eventually cease to see. And what we do not see, we do not protect, we do not fund, and we do not govern." Cameroon hosted the forum in the same city where its own education statistics tell an uncounted story: between 2017 and 2023, the number of private preschools in the country grew by 47%, and the share of children enrolled in them rose from 62% to 73%, according to UNESCO's 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report. Nobody in government planned for private preschool to become the default. It became the default because the public system could not keep pace, and parents stopped waiting for it to.
What the numbers actually show
The scale of the shift becomes clear once you look past headline enrollment figures. Cameroon's public preschools are structurally under-equipped: only 13% have playgrounds, 16% have electricity, and barely any operate a canteen, per the same UNESCO assessment. Private preschools filled the gap left by that under-investment — but not cheaply. Public school fees in Cameroon run around CFA 7,500 (about $13.40) annually, already a real obstacle for families where 40% live below the poverty line. Private school fees run 15 to 20 times higher. At the pre-primary level specifically, the 2021 national statistics institute survey found average annual costs of CFA 19,600 in public schools, CFA 47,000 in confessional private schools, and CFA 74,500 in secular private schools. The private sector did not just expand. It stratified.
The pattern is not unique to Cameroon. In Chad, 39.3% of secondary enrollment was private as of 2024, according to World Bank data — a striking figure for one of the region's poorest countries, and a sign that the private education shift is happening even where household incomes would predict otherwise. In the DRC, similar dynamics have taken hold in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, where public classrooms routinely exceed 80 to 100 students per teacher, making individualized instruction structurally impossible regardless of curriculum quality.
Why this is happening now
The demographic math is unforgiving. Central Africa is among the youngest regions on Earth — the median age in the Central African Republic is 14.3 years, and the population of the eleven-country ECCAS bloc is projected to grow from 231 million today to more than 400 million by mid-century. Public education systems built for a smaller, slower-growing population are trying to absorb enrollment growth that outpaces classroom construction by a wide and widening margin. Governments have increased education budgets — Cameroon's spending has risen in nominal terms — but construction timelines cannot compress fast enough to match the rate at which children are entering the system.
Urbanization compounds the gap geographically. As families migrate from rural areas into Douala, Yaoundé, Kinshasa, and Libreville — the same rural exodus we have documented elsewhere in this region, where agricultural communities are losing their working-age population to cities — informal peri-urban settlements expand faster than public school networks can follow. Private operators move into these gaps because they can build a classroom in months, not years, and because urban parents in expanding sectors like banking, telecommunications, and mining increasingly treat education as a investment decision rather than a guaranteed public service.
The church factor
Faith-based schools — Catholic, Protestant, and increasingly Islamic institutions — occupy a distinctive position in this landscape. They are not new entrants chasing a market opportunity; they are institutions that have provided education in remote and underserved areas since the colonial period, long before the state had the reach to do so itself. In the DRC specifically, the same church networks — Catholic, Protestant, Kimbanguist — that we have documented serving as parallel civil registries for birth and marriage records also run a significant share of the country's schools. The overlap is not coincidental. Where the state has historically been thin, church infrastructure filled multiple institutional roles simultaneously: identity, education, and social cohesion. Their continued expansion in 2026 reflects both that deep institutional legacy and sustained demand for a values-based alternative to both under-resourced public schools and expensive secular private ones.
The two-tier problem nobody has solved
The regulatory challenge this creates is not abstract. Cameroon's Ministry of Basic Education, like its counterparts across the region, lacks the administrative capacity to inspect, license, and monitor safety and teaching-quality standards across a private sector expanding by dozens of new schools annually in suburban areas with minimal government presence. The result is a bifurcated private market: elite international schools offering British, American, or IB curricula to high-income and expatriate families at one end, and a much larger tier of low-cost private schools serving working-class families at the other — schools that provide access and scheduling flexibility but that UNESCO and education researchers have flagged for unsafe infrastructure and underqualified, underpaid teaching staff. The competition for teachers compounds the quality question. Private institutions that can pay more are drawing experienced educators out of public schools, which — already operating with severely overcrowded classrooms — lose exactly the staff capacity most needed to manage that overcrowding. It is a feedback loop: public school quality declines, more parents who can afford it move to private schools, public schools lose both students and revenue-linked staffing priority, and the gap widens further.
What the Yaoundé forum was actually about
The AfDB, AU Commission, UNECA, UN Women, and UNICEF chose to hold their inaugural gender and child statistics forum in Cameroon specifically because — as UNICEF's Deputy Regional Director Ramou Ndure put it — "behind every indicator, there is a child seeking an education, a girl facing discrimination, a family aspiring to a life of dignity." The forum's stated purpose was building better data systems to track exactly the kind of two-tier educational stratification now hardening across Central Africa's cities. That data does not yet exist in the granularity needed to design policy responses. What exists, instead, is a private education sector that has already answered the question governments have not yet finished asking: who gets educated, and how well, in a region adding tens of millions of school-age children faster than any public system can absorb them.
