Sons and daughters of Abassakom have been implored to double their efforts towards promoting development and meeting the community needs, its people are faced with.
Ntumfoyn Kom Victor F. Waingeh, President General of the ABADU – Abassakom Association of Development Unions – was speaking in a State of the Union address on November 25, 2023.
Abassakom englobes all the people from the Fundong Sub Division of the Boyo Division, Northwest Cameroon.
His address was an opportunity to take stock of ABADU’s accomplishments in 2023.
“About 100 students had their GCE Registration paid. Several schools benefited from the supply of books, didactic material, and benches to support the teaching/learning process. ABADU supported the Funding Municipality Unity Tournament. In Social and Economic Development, Five (5) Women’s Groups were supported and a Youth Workshop to empower our youth was organized.
Lastly, in the humanitarian assistance area, 69 victims of the Fundong market fire disaster received aid, and victims of the August Landslide in Ameng also received assistance,” said Mr. Waingeh.
Despite the lot that ABADU has accomplished, Mr. Waingeh said: “There are still many challenges for our communities and people.”
Some of those challenges commonplace in Abassakom are the lack of the basic needs required for a successful learning experience at all levels of education; limited access to quality medicine healthcare services – with the majority of the scarcely available health facilities understaffed; incomplete development projects and unexploited touristic potentials.
Faced with such, Mr. Waingeh said the people [abassakomians] should be more than ever resourceful to surmount those difficulties.
“We are not expected to solve all [our] these problems, but we have to do better, to change the things that we have the power to change,” he stressed.
To tackle the collective challenges facing the people of Abassakom, the current ABADU executive is charting a new course through an initiative dubbed Abassakom Development Account for Progress and Transformation – ADAPT.
According to Mr. Waingeh, the ADAPT initiative “will allow every Abassakom citizen to contribute to development across the entire Abassakom territory through a one-time small donation, rather than through, multiple random and instantaneous fundraisers that engage only a few.”
It is worth noting that ABADU will in 2024, be celebrating 40 years of existence in its journey of development through the unity of the people of Abassakom and self-reliance.
At 40 ABADU envisages to project the Association and its activities to the outside world, and hence expose it to potential sources of external aid and grants.
They speak the “Itanikom” – widely spoken across the kom fundom. Abassakom means the other side of Kom.
Akem Olives Nkwain