In Cameroon, an incident last week in which a gendarme shot and killed a young child in Buea—a regional capital that has been the site of clashes between anglophone separatists and federal government forces—is the most recent outrage to make international headlines. Yet every day, the country’s civil conflict inflicts a brutal toll on the population, with surprisingly little outside attention. For five years, a deepening crisis has pit anglophone separatists against federal authorities, leading to thousands of lives lost and hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced—disrupting the education of hundreds of thousands of children in the process.

Paul J. Angelo is a fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. In this year’s Preventive Priorities Survey, experts ranked “accelerating economic collapse and political …