Mandela Washington Fellows Cameroon

Mandela Washington Fellows Cameroon is an international nonprofit organization registered with SAM.gov that serves as a prime recipient of federal grant awards from the U.S. State Department. The organization operates as the Cameroonian division of the Mandela Washington Fellowship program, which focuses on empowering African youth leaders and fostering people-to-people connections between the United States and Cameroon. Through its federal grant awards, the organization provides educational programming, youth engagement initiatives, and organizational capacity-building services that advance U.S. foreign policy objectives in West Africa.

Since 2021, Mandela Washington Fellows Cameroon has received ten federal grant awards totaling support for diverse programmatic activities, all funded through cooperative agreements and project grants by two primary State Department bureaus: the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Bureau of African Affairs. The organization's work has encompassed organizing pre-fellowship orientation and post-fellowship debriefing events for Mandela Washington Fellowship finalists in 2022, 2023, and 2024; hosting national symposiums for alumni of U.S. government exchange programs; and conducting closing ceremonies for fellowship cohorts. Additionally, the organization has executed broader youth engagement initiatives, including a youth mobilization campaign targeting 2 million Cameroonian youth to combat hate speech, radicalization, and violence across Cameroon's ten regions. Recent awards reflect expansion into entrepreneurship training, sports diplomacy, and civic engagement programming, with the most recent award granted in December 2025 focusing on youth empowerment through comprehensive training and cultural exchange initiatives. One previously awarded project grant celebrating the Mandela Washington Fellowship's 10th-year anniversary was terminated in alignment with an executive order, demonstrating the organization's responsiveness to changing federal priorities.