Limbe, Cameroon & Eket, Nigeria — It’s just before 3pm on a weekday and 17-year-old Paul Ngwa* is returning home from his job at a phone and watch repair workshop in Limbe, a coastal town in the southwest region of Cameroon. Tired and sweaty, he gets ready to head out to his second job as a laundry worker in a nearby village.

“There is a lot to finance,” says the teenager, who earns 3,000 to 7,500 Central African francs ($4.72-11.79) weekly from both jobs to help support his four-member family. Ngwa gives most of his income to Florence*, his 45-year-old single mother, who earns 4,500-6,000 CFA ($7-9) a week selling vegetables and fish by the roadside.

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Despite their combined earnings, the family finds it difficult to sustain themselves and sometimes takes out loans.

Meanwhile, Ngwa’s sisters, aged 13 and 15, have taken up farming to help the family and pass the time.

Years ago, 3pm would be the time many school pupils in Limbe returned home after a day of learning. But since a separatist crisis erupted in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions in 2016 – with some of the violence targeting schools – such routines have vanished for many students, cutting them off from their education.

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The fear of being attacked forced the Ngwa siblings to abandon their studies, he told Al Jazeera. “Many [children] now work in harsh labour jobs, while others live with trauma caused by security forces and separatist groups who have assaulted them, killed their loved ones, raped, or kidnapped them,” he said.

Since the conflict began, thousands of people have been displaced and killed in Cameroon’s English-speaking southwest and northwest regions, and nearly 500,000 children were out of school in 2024, according to UNICEF.

Meanwhile, 150km (93 miles) away from Limbe by sea, in neighbouring Nigeria’s southeast, another separatist uprising rocking the Igbo-majority region is also putting children at risk.

Breakaway agitators in that region enforce frequent sit-at-home orders targeting businesses and schools; this has heightened fear among teachers, parents and students, fuelling apathy towards education as safety concerns continue to rise.

Rejoice*, a 15-year-old student in Orlu, southeastern Nigeria, whose last name we are not using for safety reasons, relayed her ordeal to Al Jazeera. In 2023, her father stopped her from attending school after separatist fighters killed her best friend and her family during a sit-at-home campaign, she said.

Earlier that year, Rejoice’s 43-year-old mother had suffered a fatal asthma attack on another sit-at-home day. Neighbours, fearing reprisals for breaking the order, refused to help transport her to a hospital. “I was alone with her,” she said, recounting the day her mother passed away.

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“Anyone could be killed, it’s horrible,” Rejoice said, her voice shaking as she spoke. “This is our silent cry: we want our peace back, I want to see my friends in school again.”

Underreported trauma

Children in separatist conflict zones across Cameroon and Nigeria endure underreported trauma, as violence spills across borders, experts say. To understand the situation, Al Jazeera spoke to more than 40 children, humanitarian workers and education administrators in the affected regions.

Tales like that of Ngwa in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions, plagued by massacres, kidnappings, sexual violence and displacement, or of Rejoice in Nigeria’s southeastern region, where fear and uncertainty of violent separatist conflict have disrupted education and economic stability, are common.

Mark Duerksen, a research associate at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, told Al Jazeera: “Modern separatism in both countries is driven by economic injustice, political disenfranchisement, and heavy-handed security measures.”

In Cameroon’s Anglophone regions, separatists have long protested against marginalisation by the Francophone majority, which has controlled government affairs since the bilingual regions were united in 1961. In 2016, demands for political autonomy grew, with lawyers and teachers rising up in peaceful protest against the central government over the imposition of francophone systems and norms.

The government responded with a violent crackdown, including the arrest of hundreds, and by 2017, an armed separatist movement declared it would create an independent Anglophone Cameroon, called Ambazonia.

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Similarly, Nigeria’s separatist crisis dates back to its early post-independence years.

In 1967, driven by political tensions, ethnic divisions and violence against the Igbo community, a military separatist leader declared the country’s old Eastern Region an independent country, Biafra. But the civil war that followed led to the secessionists’ defeat and its integration into Nigeria.

In 2012, Nnamdi Kanu, then 45, prosecuted in Nigeria for treason, reignited the separatist campaign against the perceived mistreatment of the Igbo, using media outlets to promote secessionist messages. His trial enabled Simon Ekpa, 39, who faces terrorism charges in Finland, to lead a faction that escalated the movement with violent clashes and deadly consequences for those defying sit-at-home orders in the region.

Teachers ‘beaten’, schools ‘burned’

At the start of Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis, many civilian casualties resulted from government forces’ indiscriminate violence, abuses, and large-scale raids. “I miss my father’s voice,” said Ngwa, whose father had gone to work in Bamenda, in northwest Cameroon, but mysteriously disappeared during a government raid in late 2016.

After the declaration of Ambazonia’s independence, separatist rebels increasingly dislodged institutions controlled by Yaounde, particularly schools, which they saw as tools of francophone discrimination and oppression in the English-speaking regions.

“In 2018, during school hours, we heard gunshots and were terrified. Separatist fighters had come to close the school; they beat some teachers and burned the building,” Ngwa said.

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“That was the last time I went to school.”

A joint study by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) showed how diaspora funding for the separatist movements waned due to increased violence against civilians and tighter government control on financial transfers. Separatist rebels then resorted to extortion, smuggling and imposing so-called “liberation taxes” to finance their operations. The out-of-school children are not spared in the exploitation.

In 2023, Anita*, a 17-year-old Cameroonian refugee now living in Calabar, Nigeria, was working on a farm in Mamfe, in southwest Cameroon, when separatist fighters arrived. They demanded a liberation tax, but the farm owners were absent. Angry and disappointed, they abducted seven children, including Anita, and some adults, taking them to the hills, she said.

“We spent two days with the separatists, and during that time, two other girls and I were brutally raped,” she recounted.

Since 2016, more than 6,000 Anglophone Cameroonians have been killed in the separatist conflicts, including many children, with over a million displaced to other parts of Cameroon and Nigeria, rights group Human Rights Watch has said.

‘Worrying’

In Nigeria, sit-at-home orders in the country’s southeast were popularised by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a separatist group, to protest or commemorate specific events. In August 2021, the orders increased in frequency as the group demanded the release of its leader, Kanu, who was arrested in Kenya and extradited earlier that year. By 2022, while Kanu remained in detention, rebels loyal to Finland-based Ekpa continued to enforce the orders.

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“When these orders are issued, fearing violence, parents force schools to comply, which disrupts the academic week,” said the principal of a government-owned secondary school in Nigeria’s southeast city of Nsukka. “Few hardly return to school until several days after, or permanently remain at home,” he told Al Jazeera, speaking anonymously to avoid reprisals.

Since 2021, Nigeria’s southeastern separatist conflict has claimed at least 1,155 lives, though critics say the death toll is higher. While recent data on the number of children out of school due to the conflict is unavailable, a study estimated that violence and gender disparities have forced about 664,000 children out of school – an alarming figure for a region once known for high student enrolment.

“It is the psychological impact and the interconnectedness of the conflict that keep schoolchildren out of classes,” the school principal in Nsukka said.

Rejoice, the student in Orlu, told Al Jazeera that three girls from her neighbourhood and six of her schoolmates have relocated to safer areas in southwestern Nigeria, to continue their studies owing to fears of violence and uncertainty. “Without relatives or friends outside the region, you either stay home or risk going to school,” she said.

For Stanley Onyemechalu, a doctoral candidate working on the intersection of cultural heritage and the legacies of the Nigeria-Biafra war at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, at the University of Cambridge, while some of the reasons for separatism in the 1960s persist, support for secession in Nigeria’s southeast is waning.

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“Today, the movement is largely driven by a diaspora-based, loud [aggressive] minority, exploiting issues like unemployment, misinformation, and overall government incompetence to create an atmosphere of fear,” he said.

“It is a worrying sign that schoolchildren are impacted by these security issues,” said Onyemechalu. “However, it is still not clear how much of the chaos is actually fostered by the separatists or by other actors often called unknown gunmen.”

‘I have given up’

Experts say various factors indicate that separatist struggles in both countries are unlikely to succeed.

“First, Cameroon’s [President] Ngwa Biya and Nigeria’s [President] Bola Tinubu are staunch allies of the French and Western governments – they are guaranteed support in the days of wild separatist escalation,” said a Yaounde-based public analyst, requesting anonymity due to the Cameroonian media ban on discussing Biya.

Additionally, infighting among Anglophone separatist groups increased by 83 percent, while civilian targeting also rose by 83 percent, alongside a growing number of armed gangs in Nigeria’s southeast, ACLED data showed. With these trends, analysts say the initial support the separatist fighters garnered from the people has fallen drastically.

“We should not be mistaken, the separatist ideology still reverberates, but no one will keep his future in the hands of violent agitators,” the Yaounde-based analyst said.

In safer parts of Cameroon’s Anglophone southwest, schools are gradually reopening but remain largely nonfunctional. In the northwest, locals and school administrators told Al Jazeera that separatist violence still keeps most learning centres closed, even as children across the Anglophone regions struggle with poverty, malnutrition and limited access to basic needs.

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For Ngwa and his two sisters, education is no longer an option. “I have given up,” he told Al Jazeera, lamenting that on top of the high cost of essentials for the family, he also has the added burden of paying liberation taxes to the armed groups.

“I must work to ensure my family survives,” the 17-year-old said, “because this place feels like a forgotten and cursed land.”

*Names have been changed, or withheld, to protect the safety of those who spoke to Al Jazeera.