As of 2025-02. ACAPS recorded over 334,000 people internally displaced within the North-West and South-West and more than 76,000 refugees in Nigeria as of February 2025, well below cumulative totals because of repeated returns and re-displacement.
Protests by Anglophone lawyers and teachers in Cameroon's North-West and South-West regions in late 2016 against the use of French in courts and schools were met with force; by 2017 armed separatist groups had declared an independent 'Ambazonia' and a full insurgency was under way. The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect records more than 6,500 people killed since 2016 and states the real figure is believed to be higher, with at least 334,098 internally displaced and more than 76,493 refugees in Nigeria. Security forces have been documented committing extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, torture and the burning of villages; separatists have killed, kidnapped and extorted civilians, imposed an education boycott and attacked schools, students, teachers, health facilities and aid workers. UNHCR counted 969,000 internally displaced people in Cameroon as of mid-2025 across all of the country's crises. The conflict has attracted little international attention and no international judicial process.
Cameroonian security forces and armed Anglophone separatist groups have fought in the North-West and South-West regions, both attacking civilians and driving them into the bush, into other regions and into Nigeria
Cameroonian statistical projections from the 2005 census put the North-West at roughly 2 million and the South-West at about 1.5 million in the mid-2010s - some 3.5 million people, close to a fifth of the national population. No census has been held since 2005, so regional figures are projections.
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect cites over 6,500 killed since 2016 and states that the actual number is believed to be higher; the figure aggregates event-based conflict monitoring rather than a systematic count, and no upper bound has been established because much of the affected countryside is inaccessible to monitors.
These forms are attributed to state security forces and, apart from the burning of villages, to separatist groups by the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, drawing on UN and human rights organization reporting.
Cameroon, Nigeria