'There is no hope here' - Young Africans explain why they would risk death to leave home

Five African reporters talk to people from their home countries about why they are willing to chance everything to start a new life abroad

- Elizabeth BanyiTabi, Emmanuel Mutaizibwa, Ngina Kirori, Theophilus Abbah and Brezh Malaba

Cameroon

In the coastal city of Douala a funeral is being held for Bryan Achou*, whose body was pulled from the Mediterranean and returned to his family less than a year ago.

Friends and relatives commiserate about his fate. "He's a child from my neighbourhood. In less than two weeks, we lost two children: one was in the ocean between Turkey and Greece, the other was in Tunisia," said one woman. "Really, before 2035, this country will have been emptied of its citizens," another mourner said.

This is a reference to the government's new development paper Cameroon vision 2035, an outline of plans by the president, the 90-year-old autocrat Paul Biya, to revitalise his ailing, conflict-ridden country. Judging by the resignation in the reactions to the remark, no one here believes it will succeed. There have been so many plans since Biya came to power in 1982.

Those gathered here - business people, teachers, office workers - are not starving. Nor are they directly affected by the armed insurgency in western Cameroon. But they understand why young people want to leave, even if it means they risk death.

Shortly after attending Achou's funeral, Elizabeth BanyiTabi, a Cameroonian ZAM reporter, heard that a friend plans to leave the country via the American route: flying to Brazil and travelling north to reach the notorious Darién Gap jungle crossing at the Panama border. Survivors of the 80km trek from Colombia to Panama have described it as being "littered with bodies". BanyiTabi's friend knows this as another of her friends died there not long ago. "Yet, I'll try," she said.

Njoya, a young Cameroonian who "made it" to Germany, almost drowned when his boat sank in the Mediterranean. Now, he is waiting for the result of an asylum application.