Cameroon: The world's most neglected refugee crisis – DW – 06/07/2025

DW

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Cameroon's displacement crises are overlooked and underfunded: nowhere else is there such disparity between the political and media attention and the gravity of the situation, reports the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Whenever a conflict flares up anywhere in the world, there's generally three things outsiders can do. Governments and institutions can mediate at the diplomatic level and exert political pressure through resolutions or sanctions. Aid organizations can alleviate the plight of the affected civilian population, mostly financed by donations or government funding. And the media can help create, through their reporting, the necessary public pressure.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), the largest humanitarian organization in the Scandinavian country, systematically examines conflicts worldwide on the basis of those three criteria. The NRC has just published its annual report of the most neglected displacement crises in the world. Eight out of 10 of those crises are unfolding on the African continent.
Cameroon tops the list, followed by Ethiopia, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Mali, Uganda, Iran, the DR Congo, Honduras and Somalia.
Cameroon is a case study in global neglect, scoring shamefully low on all three criteria, NRC spokesperson Laila Matar told DW. The central African country was also on the list during the past couple of years, holding the undesirable top position most recently in 2019.
Which crises affect Cameroon?
The NRC puts Cameroon into the media attention category of "neglected". At the same time, the political will to solve the conflict receives 0 of a maximum of 30 points, and only 45% of the required aid funding is granted.
According to the NRC, more than 1.1 million people are internally displaced. In addition, there are 480,000 refugees from other countries, most of them from the Central African Republic.
Cameroon is the home of two conflicts that are geographically and politically far apart from one another. Since 2017, the western part of the country has been blighted by a civil war whose root causes date back more than a century.
After the First World War, the former German colony was divided into British and French administrative areas. To this day, English is predominantly spoken in the two western regions, North West and South West.
Radical forces are fighting for secession from the bigger, Francophone part of Cameroon and proclaimed an independent republic in 2017. Time and again, there are attacks or skirmishes with the army, which already claimed thousands of lives.
It's primarily the second, larger conflict, however, that has intensified recently. The Lake Chad region, which also includes Cameroon's far north, is being destabilized by Islamist militants operating across borders.
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What is happening in Cameroon's north?
That upsurge could be observed in Cameroon's Logone-et-Chari district, and also in Nigeria's Borno state, said Remadji Hoinathy, a Chad-based expert of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). In March 2025 alone, there were more than 10 surprise attacks on military barracks in the course of which with assailants took away a lot of military equipment, weapons, and sometimes even cars, Hoinathy told DW.
In the region, the expert added, Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram had split up into two factions. There is ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province), which pursued "a kind of heart-and-mind-winning strategy," trying to set up state-like structures in occupied areas and "sometimes trying to deliver social services, but most of the time preying on communities in terms of extortion and illegal tax collection."
The second faction is JAS (People Committed to the Prophet's Teachings for Propagation and Jihad). Hoinathy associated its approach with indiscriminate violence targeting the military, authorities and even civilians. He added that there was no way out for local people who were sometimes forced to collaborate with one of the groups, pay taxes and contribute to their objectives in order to save their own lives.
One of hundreds of thousands of victims: Haoua
Such practices play a pivotal role in driving hundreds of thousands from their homes, turning them into internally displaced persons. According to the NRC, only 30% are living in official refugee camps. The majority are left to their own devices, living in precarious conditions.
One of them is Haoua, a woman who spoke to DW at the end of 2024 in the northern town of Maroua. At the time, the 39-year-old had been living in Maroua for one year. Her husband had been arrested and one of her sons-in-law had been killed by Islamist militants, which left Haoua solely responsible for eight children and two grandchildren.
"The children don't go to school, I don't have the funds to pay for their education. I don't know where my husband is imprisoned," she told DW. "It's almost four days ago that the children and I had our last meal. When I beg for money in the street, they scare me away."
Only rarely was she able to earn some money, doing other people's washing.
Haoua and her children are struggling to make ends meet Image: Elisabeth Asen/DW
How can the situation be improved?
In order to achieve changes that benefit the local population, the security situation would have to be improved. For years already, countries in the Lake Chad region have been cooperating during joint military missions targeting Islamist militants operating across borders.
Beyond the military agenda, the ISS' Hoinathy said, those countries had also set up a "Regional Stabilization Strategy."
But after more than a decade of the fight against Boko Haram, the analyst added, one of the main challenges was a kind of fatigue in this regional cooperation.
In its report, the NRC writes that without renewed political, humanitarian or media attention, Cameroon's prospects for 2025 were "even bleaker."
Speaking to DW, NRC spokesperson Laila Matar decried that countries such as the US, UK, France and Germany had reduced their budgets for development and humanitarian aid, investing in defense instead. Of last year's global military spending, the expenses of three to four days would have been enough to cover the entire shortfall in humanitarian funding for the whole year, she added.
"So with political will, these neglected crises would be solvable," Matar said.
Josephine Mahachi and Elisabeth Asen contributed to this article. It was originally written in German.