Private Higher Education Initiatives in the North West and SouthWest Regions (Cameroon) 1994-2020: Development and Promotion of Quality Professional Studies

The 1993 Higher Education Reforms and the 1995 National Forum on Education, brought
remarkable changes in the provision of advanced education in Cameroon. The 1993 Reforms produced six
public universities and greatly emphasized on the need to orientate university education towards
professionalisation. Though the reform emphasized on professionalisation, the newly created Universities did
not quickly adjust their programmes to address the need of attenuating post-secondary schooling youth
unemployment. It is in this context that, this paper drawing from primary and secondary sources and
employing a descriptive-analytical approach, examines the seemingly grey training domains that private
higher education promoters appropriated and the extent to which they aligned their functioning with the
statutory norms of the Cameroon Ministry of Higher education. The paper argues that private higher
education institutions of learning that developed in Cameroon’s North West and South West Regions
predominantly observing somewhat Anglo-Saxon education principles set out among other business interest,
to fill the void created by the absence of professional oriented fields of study in public universities. In the
course of reaching this end, some of the institutions for different motivations dishonoured the statutory
regulations thereby abusing the confidence assigned on them by the state to serve as intermediate auxiliaries
to offer quality education geared towards containing the amplification of youth unemployment.