The CAMAB Centre

CAMAB named the problem before it had the answer. At its general assembly in January 2024, the first difficulty the association recorded against itself was plain: accommodation difficulties, due to the absence of a suitable hall to carry out its activities. An organisation with no room of its own trains nobody, houses nothing, and asks partners to meet it somewhere borrowed.

The deeper reason was harder to say, and CAMAB said it anyway. Blind women who reach a mainstream training centre in Cameroon are exposed there to gender-based violence, sexual harassment in particular, while their education continues. CAMAB’s own statement of purpose for the centre is to protect them from it. That is a safeguarding argument, not a literacy one, and it is why the centre is described as pour femmes et par les femmes — for women and by women.

What followed was advocacy, not a grant application. CAMAB worked on the Yaoundé VII council until the council acted, and recorded the result as l’aboutissement d’un plaidoyer fort, the outcome of strong advocacy. The centre was inaugurated at Nkolbisson on 7 May 2026.

It teaches four things: braille, computer skills, literacy and handicrafts. It began with one apprentice, in April 2026. A braille teacher follows the same learner week after week, rather than running a cohort. Handicrafts opened the centre to blind men as well, and that is deliberate. The protection the centre offers women is a rule about how it is run, not a wall around who may learn there.

It is a small place and it is not finished. The centre still works without a braille embosser, the single piece of equipment that would let it produce accessible-format books rather than only teach people to read them. It needs braille paper, slates and styluses, cubarithms for arithmetic, tactile drawing mats, white canes, computers, an internet connection, and specialist braille teachers for the length of a course. CAMAB provides the premises, the furniture, the office material and the volunteers itself.