By Doh James Sonkey
Secondary Education Minister, Prof Nalova Lyonga has announced that digital boards and digital connectivity will be brought into classrooms in every school in Cameroon in the new academic year.
She was speaking while officially opening the 2025/2026 Academic Year at Government Bilingual Technical High School, Nsam, in Yaoundé.
Chairing the August 19 ceremony, under the theme “safety, health and learning in age of artificial intelligence,” the Secondary Education boss told the education family that, “next year, we’re going to bring in more digital boards, to make sure that all the schools, at least each school, should have one classroom where they have digital boards to teach.”
She explained that, “we’re going to connect schools that have computers with schools that don’t have computers, so that we have a network of schools to be able to share the resources that they have.
launches 2025/2026 school year in Nsam, Yaoundé
Talking to reporters at the end of the ceremony, Minister Nalova Lyonga said “The appraisal is that MINESEC and all its teachers, as well as all its partners, have worked very hard. And I’m very proud of the students as well. Most of them have really worked hard, relying on their prowess, in spite of what they have been accused of – widespread copying. But I think that the work that MINESEC has done, teaching these children using AI, using all the distance learning tools at their disposal, has caused them to work very hard.”
She explained that “we had special projects, such as Bridge the Gap and Change the Narrative. We also had projects to make sure that girls came to school and were retained in schools. We had projects to upscale the skills of the teachers and make sure that the teachers knew what they were teaching and how to teach. All of these things made the students work hard. And the teachers, those of them who applied themselves to their work, actually did very well.”
Prof Nalova Lyonga rejoiced over “the results which recorded an increase all across the board, promising to bring in the intelligent classroom, which is a classroom where all the 35 desks of students are embedded with computers. So the students don’t need to come with books. They come and everything that they need for the class is already in their computers, right there on their desks.”
She said it’s going to be a computer-based teaching and learning throughout. So, it’s going to be a difficult time, but very enjoyable and very good for all of us. We have decided that we’re going to make all of MINESEC, on a lateral level and, you know, at every level, to make sure that all of them are going modern.”
Participants listened to exposes on the themes – State of the restructuring of specializations and Implementation of the new syllabi of the Industrial Technics Inspectorate; Capacity-building of each member of the pedagogic chain on the mastery and integration of AI in everyday class practices and Strategies and methods for the reinforcement of Health, Security and Inclusive Education with the help of Artificial Intelligence.
The principal of GBTHS Nsam expressed thanks to Minister Nalova for electricity installation on campus, “This will go a long way to enhance digitization of our teaching. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence at the Ministry of Secondary Education is the product of digitization of teaching by Prof Nalova Lyonga”, he said.
Minister Nalova Lyonga was highly acclaimed for her digitization strides in Secondary Education with over 80 000 students being impacted by the Distance Learning Centre which has already produced 10 000 videos.