Customs and traditional issues in promoting gender education at tertiary level in Cameroon

This article seeks to examine the role of customs and tradition in fostering gender education at tertiary level in Cameroon. The impact of traditional societies on the promotion of gender education in Cameroon is a vital premise to look at. Traditional societies through traditional norms, values, rites and practices constitutes some of the obstacles in enhancing educational equality at tertiary level, and as such factors prevents students especially female students from life- long learning, that is women and young girls are hindered from ascending to higher education. Hereby, preventing them from becoming pertinent actors in the socio-political and economic development of the nation. Within the context of this study the social learning theory by Dorothy smith with the standpoint theory, which states “once level of education determines where he or she stands in the society†since women have limited access to tertiary education, they are also less represented in at the workplace and in public spaces. The study was carried out using the mixed method qualitative and quantitative research method whereby, the main instruments for data collection were the questionnaire, focus group discussion guide and interview guide. The simple random sampling techniques and the purposeful sampling techniques were used to obtain a sample size of 420 for the study. Content analysis was used to analyze qualitative data. The statistical instrument used to analyze quantitative data was the spearman rank correlation and the following results were obtained. Here hypothesis the p-value was less than the alpha, and the correlation coefficient was 0.657. Based on this we reject the null hypothesis and conclude that Customs and traditions significantly influence the promotion of gender education