The government of Cameroon and World Bank Group have renewed their strategy for 2017-2021, the Country Partnership Framework (CPF). This defines Cameroon’s development priorities and areas of focus for the Bank Group’s support—financial, technical, and analytical. The drawing-up of the CPF followed wide-ranging consultations with members of the Cameroonian public, civil society, private sector, international donors, and other stakeholders in economic development.
Key Areas of Focus
The Bank Group’s technical and financial assistance to Cameroon will focus in the following three areas:
- Poverty traps in rural areas, especially in northern regions of the country, to help address the deficit in human development indicators which have weakened the ability of local communities to withstand economic, environmental, and conflict-related shocks.
- Infrastructure and private sector development, focusing on energy and transport, the business climate, and financial services, as well as the quality of the workforce, and using these as cross-cutting building blocks of private sector development. Access to energy and transport, the poor business environment, the limited availability of finance and its cost, and inadequate workforce skills are all consistently cited by the private sector as its main obstacles to growth.
- Governance, because weak governance affects efforts to promote shared prosperity and reduce poverty in Cameroon. This has three objectives: more efficient public expenditure and services; improved regulation in key sectors; and increased citizen engagement in service delivery.
The World Bank has an on-going portfolio of 2 IBRD operations and 13 IDA projects worth a total amount of US$1.4 billion; the IFC has 14 private investments for a total outstanding portfolio of $ 404 million; and MIGA is currently supporting 3 projects with gross exposure of $265 million.
