Negotiating Education Amid Insurgency: Community Agency, Resilience, and Coping Mechanisms in Muyuka Sub-Division, Cameroon

Abstract

The prolonged insurgency in Cameroon’s North-West and South-West Regions has profoundly disrupted formal education, exposing children and educational institutions to insecurity, displacement, economic hardship, and psychosocial distress. This study examines how communities in Muyuka Sub-Division have responded to the disruption of formal schooling, with particular attention to community agency, resilience, and coping mechanisms. The study adopts a qualitative approach to examine the ways in which parents, teachers, community leaders, and other local actors negotiate educational continuity amid conflict. The findings reveal that insurgency has disrupted school attendance, teaching and learning, teacher availability, educational infrastructure, and children’s psychosocial well-being. Nevertheless, communities have demonstrated considerable agency by mobilising social networks, local resources, alternative learning arrangements, informal teaching, remedial education, psychosocial support, and other adaptive strategies. These mechanisms have helped sustain educational opportunities and mitigate some immediate consequences of prolonged school disruption. However, their effectiveness remains constrained by insecurity, inadequate resources, limited infrastructure, uneven access, and the absence of stable institutional support. The study therefore argues that community-based educational responses should be understood as important but inherently limited mechanisms of resilience rather than substitutes for formal education or State responsibility. Sustainable educational recovery in Muyuka requires a complementary approach that strengthens community initiatives while restoring educational infrastructure, supporting teachers, expanding psychosocial services, improving security, and ensuring sustained institutional and financial investment. The study concludes that meaningful educational recovery in insurgency-affected communities depends on transforming community resilience into a supported component of a broader, inclusive, secure, and sustainable educational recovery framework.