"What do you do before reading your textbooks," the Mayor of Akono asks the shy schoolgirl, about nine years old. "I wash my hands," the kid replies. Such reading etiquette is rare in Cameroon. But in a sprawling rural settlement in the heart of Cameroon's luxuriant equatorial rainforest, most kids would give a similar response. These kids are not extraordinary. They are simply products of an ingenious programme aimed at increasing literacy and raising the standards of education that the municipality of Akono has been experimenting for a year now.