Award-winning Dschang thesis finds 60% of Cameroonians excluded from health messages

A doctoral thesis in Cameroon argues that language, rather than medicine, can become the biggest barrier to receiving health information. Its author, Dr Ambelem Tangyie Aya-Nwi, has won the award for the best thesis of the 2025-2026 academic year at the Dschang School of Arts and Social Sciences.

The research says linguistic exclusion prevents 60% of Cameroonians from accessing health messages. It calls for a redesign of public communication so that health information can reach people in the country’s multilingual setting.

Titled "A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Social Communication and Social Conflict within the Health Domain in the Multilingual Context of Cameroon," the thesis was supervised by Professor Emmanuel Nforbi. Aya-Nwi conducted four years of research in Dschang, Bamenda and Douala.

The study used 500 questionnaires and 100 interviews. The fieldwork included the period of Cameroon’s anglophone crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, placing communication problems within two periods when access to clear health information carried particular weight.

The findings present the issue as a political challenge for Cameroon’s health system, which the research says does not sufficiently account for the country’s linguistic diversity.