TMTFMAGAZINE, Issue one, 2026: Education Changes Everything

What started with a few children has grown year by year because sometimes the difference between a child remaining in education and dropping out is an amount that can seem relatively small to someone elsewhere in the world, but can be impossible for a family already choosing between competing necessities.

We cannot reach every child in Cameroon who needs support, and we have never pretended that we can. But we can reach one. Then another. Then another.

We can do it responsibly, work alongside people who know their communities, follow the impact of our support and grow without losing sight of the individual child behind every number.

More than a decade later, that remains the heart of Teach Me To Fish.

I know what it feels like when education suddenly feels uncertain. I also know what becomes possible when that obstacle is overcome.

No child's potential should be determined simply by whether their family can afford the basic tools they need to learn.

That is why we keep showing up.

Teach Me To Fish Foundation is named after a Cameroonian parable: teach me to fish, do not simply give me fish. It is a commitment rather than a slogan. Everything the foundation funds has to put a child in a classroom and keep them there.

The work is in Cameroon because that is where our founder was born and educated, from nursery school through to university, before building a career in the United Kingdom. Rather than spreading effort thinly across many countries, the foundation invests deeply in the communities it knows best, working with the same schools, families and organisations year after year.

The flagship programme is Back to School, or Operation Ten Thousand Francs a Child. Ten thousand Francs CFA covers one child's fees, uniform and materials for a school year. Children collect their packs at a single event, alongside their families.

Teach Me To Fish raises money in the United Kingdom. It cannot, from there, know which child in Buea stopped coming to school last term, or which family would send their daughter back if the fee were met. Somebody has to know that, and knowing it is not a thing you can buy in.

Eteki Stella Dopgima founded the Centre for Youth and Family Empowerment and leads it. She is a gender expert and Director of the Women's Empowerment Centre in Buea. Her team identifies the communities where support is most needed, sources and assesses the children who will receive it, sits with their families, and scouts the small local organisations the foundation goes on to fund. In the charity's own words, that local insight is critical: it is what lets a foundation abroad understand need first-hand rather than at second remove.

Trust is the part that cannot be shortcut. Families hand over information about their circumstances to someone who will be in the same town next year, not to a form. The grassroots organisations that get assessed before funding is committed are assessed by someone who will meet them again. Every safeguard in the way this programme is run rests on somebody local being answerable, and being willing to be.

Resilience is the part the numbers show. Four editions of Back to School carry no separate figure in this issue, because they fell during the Anglophone Crisis, when schools closed and a single registration event was not possible. Support did not stop. It moved to smaller, dispersed distributions and to the children whose education would otherwise have ended altogether. Programmes that survive years like that survive because somebody on the ground refuses to let them lapse.

And determination is the rest of it: turning up for a thirteenth year, to a hall that has to be booked, bags that have to be packed, and several hundred families who have to be told where to come and when. None of that is glamorous and all of it is the work.