Our Mission

Every month of June, parents like children rejoice because the academic year they were in is finished and they can finally rest a little from all the stress it came with. But generally, that only lasts two months because by the end of July, parents especially are back into that stress. And the most stressful usually being paying the registration and first installment fees of their children, and of course, the textbooks!

Hopefully, one day, CTBN will provide a solution for the former (registration and fees), but for now CTBN offers a solution for the latter; the textbooks!

How it usually goes

Parents will receive a book list from the school of their child and they will have to get the books from a “supplier”. By supplier, we mean any entity which could be a bookstore, a textbook publisher or our infamous “poteau” (individuals that have used textbooks that are still valid as per the curriculum), that has one or all of the textbooks the parent needs.

Everything should go on smoothly from here, at least, that is how it would normally go but that is not how things are. The major question parents usually ask themselves is, “where can I find all these textbooks without wasting a lot of energy, time, and especially money?” Up until now, there was no answer for this question and parents had to move around, day after day, spending valuable energy that could be used elsewhere productively, wasting time that could be used appropriately elsewhere, and spending money on taxies, going from one neighborhood to the other trying to find out if the bookstores in the area have at least some of the textbooks they need.

The solution

CTBN, which stands for Cameroon Textbook Network, was created to solve this problem. It brings together suppliers, and parents, also known as “customers” on CTBN, in one place so that parents no longer have to spend enormous amounts of energy, time and money in finding and acquiring textbooks for their children each academic year. CTBN does not only benefit customers, but also suppliers who usually end up with textbooks on their shelves while some children go to school without textbooks. These textbooks could have been sold if they had more visibility.

The goal of CTBN

We hope that publishers, bookstores, individuals (a.k.a le poteau), and parents, or in CTBN terminology, suppliers and customers, will join the CTBN platform in order to enable children who go to school in Cameroon to have their textbooks on time, and to enable parents to use their energy, time and money more effectively during these periods. If you would like to know how the CTBN works, please refer to our documentation for everything you need to know about using CTBN.

Altogether let us move towards a simpler Cameroon, where our energy, time and money are used to make our lives easier, not harder.