The President
Dr. Beatrice Wamey is an American citizen or Cameroonian origin. She was born to a peasant family in a small village of Lum-Oku, in the North West Province of Cameroon. While her village had a first cycle primary school (first four years of elementary) Beatrice walked twelve miles every day to and from school to complete the last three years of basic education.
She attended Saint Augustine's Secondary School in Kumbo and acquired a high school education through independent study while working with the local administration. She then went on to Yaounde University, where she majored in English Modern Letters. After her undergraduate studies, Beatrice continued into the Higher Teacher's College of Yoaunde University where she completed a graduate program in the Teaching of English as a Second Language. After two years of teaching she gained an AFGRAD Fellows Award to do a Masters program in Applied Linguistic at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
She returned to Cameroon and back to a fulltime job as English teacher at the bilingual high school, part time instructor of phonetics at Yaounde University and adjunct instructor of methodology at the Higher Teachers' College. This was punctuated by interludes of professional and political activism that spiced up her life and yielded recognition and respect from professional peers and seniors.
Back on campus again in the United States in 1996, she dove into the intimidating but alluring arena of instructional systems technology. After four years of intensive work at Indiana University in Bloomington, she graduated with a Doctorate degree in Instructional Systems Technology, having conducted research on the design of distance learning for an African University.
Beatrice has since then worked as an instructional designer with the World Bank Institute, a consultant with the World Bank Country office in the Republic of Congo and a trainer-trainer/instructional designer for the Foreign Service Institute before creating her own organization.
Her pragmatism and passion for change and adventure motivated her militancy in the Social Democratic Front (SDF), one of the foremost opposition parties in Cameroon. Beatrice was at one-time the lone female voice of the Southern Cameroon's National Conference that has been fighting for the return of Cameroon to its former two-state federation. As the only female member of the executive of the Teacher's Association of Cameroon, she contributed significantly to the education reforms that led to the creation of the General Certificate of Education Examinations Board, where she served as the Research officer for three years.
Married, mother of two and matriarch to many, she is the epitome of female managerial, multi-tasking capabilities that are characteristic of women around the world.
