Case study: Nugunu Project, Cameroon

By Clinton Robinson

During our first years in the village, we made contact with the local development association, the churches, and some school principals and teachers. We worked with a language committee which was quite active. The churches and the language committee participated in language work, but it seemed that no other local organization was interested.

During a subsequent brief stay in the village some years later to do a specific piece of research, I contacted a number of the local agencies engaged in rural development. Most of these expressed a detached interest in using the local language in their work, but were clearly not committed to taking any initiative--except one.

The staff of a rural development community center were already encouraging their nonlocal staff to learn Nugunu and could see the value of local language literacy. They were eager to have the Nugunu publications and were a potential partner in literacy efforts.

This interest had to be discovered--by networking. Only by making the effort to find out who was working for the development of the area and by going out to meet them, could we know what potential there was for cooperation in literacy.