Northwest Region

More than 600,000 children in Cameroon's Northwest Region have been denied schooling since armed conflict shut over 80% of the region's schools — a figure documented by the United Nations, not estimated. The anglophone crisis, which crossed from lawyers' protests to armed insurgency in 2017, has displaced over a million people from the Northwest and neighbouring Southwest regions combined and reduced the Northwest's nighttime light intensity by 25%, a satellite-measured proxy for economic collapse.

The roots are constitutional. In 1961, the English-speaking territory of Southern Cameroons joined Francophone Cameroon as a co-equal federated state with its own parliament, judiciary, and prime minister. In 1972, a referendum abolished the federation and reduced the English-speaking regions to provinces under central Francophone authority. That structural demotion — path-dependence locked into constitutional law — is the grievance the separatist movement now enforces through violence.

The economic destruction follows a trophic cascade. Agriculture collapses first: arabica coffee, the Ndop rice paddies, and Oku white honey — produced nowhere else in Cameroon and bearing Africa's first geographic indication certification — all require field access that armed confrontation denies. When farmers withdraw, the markets, transport networks, and processing facilities that depend on them fail in sequence. Bamenda, the regional capital and once the commercial hub of Cameroon's anglophone northwest, has recorded over 900 documented violent incidents since 2017.

The separatist movement's most revealing mechanism is the Monday lockdown. Since 2018, armed groups have enforced weekly economic shutdowns on the majority of Mondays — roughly 40 to 45 days per year of compulsory closure for markets, transport, and businesses. The lockdowns prove that a non-state actor exercises de facto governing authority over the population's economic behaviour. The system has settled into an alternative stable state: violence triggers displacement, displacement collapses consumer demand, collapsed demand eliminates the incentive to stay. For any organisation operating in fragile regions, the pattern illustrates a structural truth — conflict creates equilibrium shifts that ceasefire alone cannot reverse, because supply chains, institutional authority, and trust networks must be rebuilt simultaneously, not sequentially.