Where We Work in Cameroon

Women's Light Foundation began in the Northwest and Southwest Regions because that is where the unmet development needs of women and girls in Cameroon are most acute. Both regions combine high rates of poverty, limited access to social services, large numbers of displaced people and host communities, many households headed by a single parent, and significant numbers of girls who are out of school.

These are development challenges that exist across many parts of Cameroon and will persist beyond any temporary circumstance. Our mandate is therefore national, flexible and long-term, rooted in community development rather than in any particular political or security context. The model is built to be replicated in at least four regions of Cameroon.

Our two bases

The head office sits at Campaign Street in Buea, the Southwest Region's capital. A second base operates from Bamenda, the Northwest Region's capital. Programme pillars are planned for both regions, coordinated from these offices and delivered in the communities themselves; each programme page reports what has been delivered so far.

How communities are chosen

Within each region, communities are selected through participatory needs assessments conducted with communities rather than about them. Priority follows our value of inclusion: underprivileged girls, single mothers, internally displaced persons, persons with disabilities and rural women. Selection criteria are applied openly so that decisions are understood and trusted locally.

What distance actually costs

Distance is the variable that quietly determines most outcomes in both regions. It decides whether a girl completes secondary school or stops at the point where the walk becomes too long or too unsafe. It decides whether a survivor of violence can reach a health facility within the window where medical evidence can still be collected. It decides how many hours a day a woman spends collecting water rather than earning.

Programmes designed without accounting for it tend to report good attendance among the households nearest the road and miss the ones furthest from it entirely. This is why our monitoring disaggregates by geographic location as well as by sex, age and disability status.

Working in both languages

The Northwest and Southwest are Cameroon's Anglophone regions, while national engagement with ministries, UN agencies and donors frequently happens in French. We work in both, and we publish this website in both, because an organisation that can only operate in one language is limited either in the communities it can serve or in the institutions it can influence.

Beyond these two regions

Our long-term goal is to replicate this model in at least four regions of Cameroon. That expansion is deliberately sequenced behind proving the model here, building the governance and financial systems institutional funders require, and securing multi-year funding. Expanding faster than we can supervise would compromise the quality of what already exists.