Current Status

Some 40,000 people die from malnutrition and hunger related causes every day. Every year, almost 12 million children die before they are five from preventable causes. Much of this human suffering is due to lack of knowledge, sometime associated with non-rational use of the existing preventive and control measures. A UNDP report on 174 countries showed that Sub-Saharan Africa region has the lowest index value of human development, a composite index that integrates GDP, life expectancy and education indexes. Of the 45 countries with the lowest human development index value, 36, including Cameroon, are from the Africa continent. Also, of the 25 countries with the lowest human poverty index value, 20 of them, including Cameroon, are African countries. With the economic crisis, there is a decrease in the school completion rates in Cameroon, and many students are leaving school prematurely due to the very limited financial means of their families. Last year, the World Business Almanac reported that primary school enrolment that approached 99% in the early 1980s in Cameroon had slipped back to only 62% by the late 1990s. The phenomena has being worsened by a pandemic of HIV AIDS conjugated with associated opportunistic diseases, including a number of parasitic infections in human that are now back to where they were in the 1950s.