Meet Sally Mboumien. In Cameroon, she’s leading extraordinary peace-building efforts.
A conversation for Project Rewrite
Project Rewrite, a new initiative from the Wikimedia Foundation, is calling attention to gender gaps in the information landscape (the universe of resources we turn to for knowledge), and calling on everyone to help close them. Every organization and person can help to amplify women’s stories. As a Project Rewrite partner, World Pulse is sharing this conversation with a inspiring women leader we want you to know about.
In Cameroon, a more than four-year-long conflict has killed at least 6,000 people and displaced 600,000 more. Despite a largely silent international community, women leaders like Sally Mboumiem are undeterred in their peacebuilding efforts. Amid death threats, displacement, and a global pandemic, they’ve organized online and on the ground to call for a permanent end to the violence.
Sally is the general coordinator for the Southwest/Northwest Women’s Taskforce (SNWOT), a coalition of women leaders and women-led organizations working to ensure women’s meaningful participation and decision-making in resolving the Anglophone conflict. In 2020, Sally and SNWOT received the Distinguished Partners for Peace and Security Award.
Sally is also a teacher, researcher, social activist, and the founder and executive director of Common Action for Gender Development (COMAGEND). She was named in 2021 to the Gender Security Project’s FemiList 100, a curated list of 100 women working in the fields of foreign policy, peacebuilding, law, activism, and development.
We caught up with Sally to learn more about how she got her start in peace-building—and what the international community can do to support women in Cameroon.
How did you get involved in peace-building efforts, and how do you see your role today in Cameroon’s Anglophone conflict?
I was born for this. Growing up in a polygamous community as I did, there was always a conflict of interest or competition for attention to resolve. I grew up in a large household surrounded by boys and learned to fight for my rights. I became the voice who spoke to my father about household issues. People started coming to me with their different issues to settle. There was an inter-tribal conflict where people from my mother’s village fought people from my father’s village (the Bali/ Bawock Crisis). I prepared to speak to both villages and discovered the power of peacebuilding.
After I started Common Action for Gender Development, I joined World Pulse. It helped me grow my voice and build international sisterhood. I followed a lot of what Mama Shujaa was doing [with their digital empowerment training hub] in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Little did I know in no distant time, my country would also be in a violent conflict. When the conflict broke out in my community, I felt compelled to get involved.
We started giving food supplies to the increasing number of displaced people to provide them with relief. I came out to the forefront and became a source of hope for people. When [women] created Southwest/Northwest Women’s Taskforce (SNWOT), I couldn’t help but join. I started humbly as an assistant and I’m now the general coordinator leading different issues. For example, I went to meet with the separatist leaders in America in 2019. I reported to the government in my country on the status of women’s issues. I am also the women’s representative on the National Steering Committee for the Presidential Plan for Reconstruction and Development in the NWSW Region.
Why do you think women play such an important role in advocating for peace in Cameroon and worldwide?
We cannot underestimate women’s role in the call for peace from this conflict. Women, as victims, are coming from the perspective of survivors and advocates. They are coming with compassion and love. Their resilience is unimaginable. It’s just natural that people who have felt the most pain fight the most to get that pain off. Women embody what it takes to resolve a conflict. They are quick to forgive. They have this hope that no matter how dark it gets, we shall overcome. They have learned to survive and transferred these skills into peace resolution.
Our advocacy has given a voice to women because those who have taken an interest in the Cameroonian issue at some point have listened to something a Cameroonian woman said. We have also succeeded in bringing some degree of consciousness in creating communities respectful of women and women’s representation in those communities.
At COMAGEND, while we are responding to the existing conflict, we are also leveling the ground for adolescent girls and young women to get interested in politics and policy so that we can have women who are running for office and making decisions at every level.
Through COMAGEND, you have worked extensively on advocating for women and girls’ sexual and reproductive rights. What are some of the achievements you’ve seen and progress that’s been made as a result of this work?
Through the Empower Me, Don’t Blame Me campaign, we have succeeded in breaking the stigma and raising awareness about sexual health and reproductive rights. This conversation wasn’t being taken seriously in our communities. We created a safe space where we teach girls leadership skills through the My Sister, My Friend program, which has reached more than 400 girls in different communities and engaged 80 community peer educators. Overall in our five-year run, we have reached more than 40,000 girls and young women.
Now we are moving into the policy space. Girls trained in our communities have started advocacy initiatives and received international speaking opportunities. Our long-term vision is for partners to train women to run for office after the conflict. When girls have the chance to discuss politics, exercise civic engagement, and take on leadership positions, they’ll be part of the conversation about serious systemic change.
One of our themes is healing trauma and building trust. We’re training 20 trainers to support women in healing and rebuilding their communities. We’re advocating for women’s meaningful representation within decision making spaces during the peace process to resolve the ongoing conflict.
Can you paint a picture of what things are like in Cameroon more than four years into this conflict?
The ongoing conflict in Cameroon is one of the world’s worst conflicts. It’s a situation that has so badly degenerated that it is no longer just physical violence. The unfortunate thing is that the conflict is viewed in many different ways by different groups of people, making it very difficult to resolve. Even if we silenced the guns tomorrow, we would still have a society that would take 10 years to heal.
The conflict began with people from the English-speaking parts struggling to claim their rights within the state of Cameroon. English speakers constitute the minority population. There are different schools of thought on how best this situation could be addressed — through a change in constitution representative of the people, by creating separated territories, in making calls for unity. In the midst of all of this, different groups are perpetrating violence to express their opinions. It is claimed the separatist movement has the highest rate of violence. The government is very repressive, and there’s a heightened military crackdown.
You’ve described this conflict as an encyclopedia of the most dehumanizing and traumatic abuse on women and girls. How has this crisis affected Cameroonian women?
Women remain like toys in the hands of all the conflict leaders. When you listen to the speeches made by the different factions, they will tell you that they are fighting for women and girls and children because they are vulnerable. Our more than four years of this deadly, traumatic, and violent conflict prove that it is lip service.
This conflict has become the burden of women and girls. The separatists’ lockdowns have affected women and girls, especially young women who do not have an education but families to feed. They often trade perishable goods at markets. Imagine these women forced to stay home for 52 days a year because of lockdowns or abandon their goods because of a shoot out. How do you expect them to survive?
The world seems to turn away as perpetrators violate women on video and submit it on social media. Families send their girls to get married either in safer zones or to soldiers/fighters, but when these children go to safer zones, they often become sex trafficked into brothels.
What do you want the international community to know about your reality on the ground? What can they do to support your advocacy?
The situation on the ground should be a red flag to the international community. We are not getting our humanitarian needs met in Cameroon. The kinds of violence that women have endured need to be sanctioned as war crimes. The international community has neglected the voices of women and girls who have called out for so long. Our government has put so many measures in place to be able to resolve the conflict, but we are yet to experience an end to this physical violence so we can engage in these dialogues.
It is us as a people of Cameroon who have to stand up and resolve our problems. But given the magnitude of this conflict, it is [the international community’s] time to come on board with much-needed support so that we can find common ground and seek lasting solutions. Get interested in what’s happening. Add your voice to the voices of women and others in Cameroon advocating for peace.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Connect with Sally Mboumien and visit World Pulse’s Cameroon Hub. You can support Sally’s work by signing this Change.org petition.
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Learn more about Wikipedia’s gender gap and help them close the divide by joining Project Rewrite. You can also check out Project Rewrite’s profile of Jensine Larsen, the founder of World Pulse.
