Russian Language Enters Central African Republic’s School Curriculum, by Kestér Kenn Klomegâh

Aurélien-Simplice Kongbélet-Zingas, Minister of Education of the Central African Republic (CAR), has signed an order introducing the Russian language into the school curriculum of the country’s secondary educational institutions. The decision was made on September 30 during a meeting of the Russia–CAR intergovernmental commission.

Teachers of the Partner Russian House (PRH) in Bangui have been teaching Russian in schools of the African country since 2024. In the past academic year, 1,100 Bangui schoolchildren began learning Russian directly in school classrooms.

In addition, the partner representative office offers free Russian language courses for adults and children, which about 2,000 people attend each year. The trend of growing interest in the Russian language in the CAR is evident from the dynamics of requests from the schools themselves.

In the 2024–2025 academic year, Russian was introduced into the curriculum of two private schools at the initiative of their management. In 2025–2026, six schools in the capital had already approached the PRH with a request to organize classes. The center took on the material, technical, and methodological support of the educational process.

The PRH in Bangui was opened in 2022. In 2023, the Center for Open Education in Russian and Russian Language Teaching opened at the University of Bangui. Since 2019, Russian has been offered to CAR schoolchildren as an elective alongside French, Spanish, and Chinese. In November 2024, on the sidelines of the first ministerial conference of the Russia–Africa Partnership Forum, an agreement was signed on the construction of a joint educational center in Bangui. Each year, Russia provides the CAR with a quota of 75 places for study at Russian universities at the expense of the federal budget.

The first meeting of the Russian–Central African intergovernmental commission was held on September 30 in Bangui. As a result, the sides signed a roadmap for cooperation in the energy sector for 2026–2028, as well as a memorandum on cooperation between the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Bangui. Diplomatic relations between Russia and the CAR were established in 1960. On September 28, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved the proposal to sign an agreement on the foundations of relations between the two states.