Increasing access to justice in rural Cameroon

The Global Conscience Initiative (GCI) Centre for Arbitration and Mediation (CAMs) project commenced effectively in the Month of April with three members of the CAM’s team bent on achieving the goals outlined. Some communities were set aside to accomplished the goals of CAMs of work on ten (10) communities categorized in two groups. The groups that need to receive follow up workshops and the other group with sensitization and workshops on the CAMs curriculum. These communities include (Mofako Bekondo,Three Corners Ekombe,Teke, Bakossi Camp,Bombe Bakundu, Mbalangi, Ediki, Barombi Native,Kosalla II,and Kosalla III) all around Kumba with focus also on selecting the community that will solely benefit the one year CAMs program.

The work in the months of April and May consisted of Community preparatory visits to all the traditional Councils of the aforementioned communities. The team’s motives for these visits were to observe the traditional Council Sessions to that have already received the workshops on mediation and related topics. These follow up workshops are based on some specific topics that particular to some challenges or problems still plaguing the management of the settlement of the disputes in the community councils. New topics came up like Formality, proper organization, gender empowerment etc. The councilors of these communities were happy to receive the GCI CAMs team for fulfilling their promise to visit them regularly and see a continuity of the project. They could present some problems to the team in their move to implement what they were taught in the previous year.

The team carried a survey both in the community and amongst the councilors to be able to measure the implementation of the lessons taught during the workshop in the previous years. Mr. John Fongang who is the Chairman of the Bombe council said “ Thanks to this workshops, my councilors have become very conscious on decision making”. This is the impact we are expecting from the community. Even though the results of the survey did not project a great improvement in majority of the communities, they was definitely some remarkable progress.

As a new move of the project to create a booklet containing all the varieties of cases and judgements handled by the communities, over the course of the visits, members of the CAMs team took down a number of Cases that had been resolved in each community in order to compile them and publish in the nearest future. This will help the councils to facilitate the judgment process with this jurisprudence. A copy of the publication will be sent out to all of the communities to serve as a judgment decision guide whereby Councilors both present and the future could refer to during Council Sessions as model for better decision making.

The month of June was characterized fully by workshops based on the evaluation on the visits to each community and the problems discovered in dispute solving. Majority of the councils received the workshops and also extended to the month of July. Due to the heavy rainy seasons and the bad roads, the dateline for the workshops was not respected because of many postponements. But all was done to make sure that the planned meetings held. The number of presence in the workshops meeting was very encouraging to most of the communities than last year because of the need that they have realized for their various communities. The project was rich with human resources by many persons who had applied to do internship with Global Conscience both in the National Universities and International Universities.

Workshops extended to the month of July so as to finish the communities earmarked to accomplish CAMs goal for the year. It was really a successful quarter as the community councilors requested for more like Oliver Twist. The team is now preparing survey sheets to go back to the communities and still measure what has just been put in the community.

We shall remain very faithful and diligent as we immensely thank our donors for the wonderful contributions they are making to this work, Human rights and humanity as a whole to this global world. Your immense contributions have been of utmost importance to the success of this project and we are calling on you not to relent on your efforts as we look forward to a more challenging days ahead. We are grateful for your support.