Why is cameroon poor

In addition to the 27 participants from NGOs, local communities and government, 60 members of the community were provided with a practical and easy-to-use planning tool for the identification of community based projects. Flight destinations included Ndjamena Chad. About 89 percent of the total requests received were covered during this month. This all created a very difficult environment for the conduct of economic activity.

As noted in section Boosting productivity will require institutions and policies which affect the incentive to generate and disseminate innovations in the country. The political economy context is also very important, with Kobou et al.

Governments in Cameroon have faced a continual challenge to seek to maintain peace in a p. The country has avoided open conflict, but peacebuilding has been a permanent focus of the government.

To add to this are religious differences with the country approximately equally divided between Christianity, Islam, and traditional beliefs. To seek to maintain social cohesion in this environment has been a major focus of all governments. The authors argue that this has led to some suboptimal decisions; for instance, they contend that both ministerial appointments and employment in the public sector have been seen much more as a means of sharing power and resources among different interest groups.

The public-sector payroll was used as a means of creating employment for these groups. While this may have maintained peace, it has failed to provide effective service delivery. To sum up this review, growth performance has been disappointing for most of the period since independence with the exception of the relatively short-lived and ultimately unsustainable growth burst the country experienced between and Ineffective management of the natural resource wealth was definitely a major part of the explanation; but even aside from the resource wealth, weak institutions and poor implementation of policy would appear to have been a common theme in Cameroon.

What have been the consequences of the above record of economic performance for the evaluation of poverty and living conditions in Cameroon? This then corresponds entirely to the last of the four sub-periods described in section There is little comparable data before this period. The three ECAM surveys collect similar data, which includes detailed information on consumption. Household welfare is measured here as household consumption expenditure per adult equivalent; further detail on the precise definition is provided in Appendix 1 of Fambon et al.

A poverty line for Cameroon was set in based on a consumption basket comprising sixty-one food items which provided 2, kcal per adult equivalent; the non-food p.

We begin by analysing the change in household consumption between the survey years, which are presented in Table Household consumption grew by Between and annualized growth rates of consumption were high in both urban and rural areas, especially in the latter, but between and consumption fell sharply in rural areas, while it continued to rise, though at a slower rate, in urban areas.

By region there was quite a big diversity in growth rates between and Summary poverty indices for the national level are presented in Table The national poverty headcount fell significantly between and from But the poverty severity measure P 2 does show a significant reduction between and from 7 per cent to 5 per cent; and the Watts index too shows a significant reduction.

Thus, the poverty reduction which did happen over this period occurred mostly at the bottom of the distribution. Poverty incidence curves Figures These curves suggest that the patterns of changes in poverty discussed above are not likely to be sensitive to the precise location of the poverty line, in any reasonable range. But they do also show evidence of greater poverty reduction at the bottom of the distribution between and These periods show substantially better progress in urban areas than rural areas, as seen in Table This is in line with the results in section There was a significant reduction in urban poverty p.

Table Trends in monetary poverty in urban and rural areas, — Similar information for the twelve commonly identified provinces of Cameroon for and is presented in Table Among the other regions, the Southwest, West, and South had the lowest levels of poverty in both and , and poverty also fell over this period. The poorest provinces in both years were the North, Northwest, Adamaoua, the Far North, the Centre, and the East, though the ranking differs from year to year.

Four of these provinces the exceptions being the Centre and Northwest showed increasing poverty headcounts between and , this being large and statistically significant in the North and Far North increases of The significant poverty increase in the Far North province may be due to situational obstacles such as the advent of floods and invasions of granivorous birds in this province of the country in , which resulted in a serious loss of goods and harvests that negatively affected the population.

In addition, structural obstacles such as anarchic agricultural practices and the chronic rainfall deficit contributed to the fall in agricultural production and the aggravation of p. Moreover, the peasants are victims of an inability to store which leads them to sell the bulk of their agricultural output at harvest time, only to borrow money during hard times at high interest rates to buy vital commodities to make ends meet.

Moreover, some companies in the timber industry were delocalized to establish their headquarters in Douala, a move likely to limit the employment opportunities of the population and the tax revenues of the municipalities of the province.

The poverty increase in the regions of Adamaoua and the North may be due to the loss of earnings in terms of revenues caused by the completion of the construction work of the Doba-Kribi pipeline. A decomposition of changes in poverty between and into growth and redistribution components using the technique developed by Datt and Ravallion not presented here shows that the growth effect plays an important part in accounting for urban poverty reduction and rural poverty increase, but that there is also a strong poverty-reducing redistribution effect in urban areas.

The increase in poverty in the northern provinces of the North and the Far North reflects sharply adverse growth and redistribution effects; in Adamaoua there is also an adverse redistribution effect. A similar decomposition by the main activity of the household shows a sharp poverty reduction among those in non-farm activities, both formal and informal though faster in the latter, but a sharp poverty increase among those working in agriculture.

These changes predominantly reflect growth effects. Values of summary inequality measures for Cameroon for the three years are summarized in Table The overall pattern shown in this table is of no p. The growth incidence curve GIC comparing and shows positive growth throughout most of the distribution except at the very bottom and top Figure On the other hand, the GIC for —7 Figure This is consistent with the reduction in inequality in this period, with little change in the incidence of poverty, but a reduction in the severity of poverty associated with the improving outcomes for the poorest.

The main source for the analysis of non-monetary measures of poverty is the Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in , , , and Only since then has the mortality rate fallen, though it still remains at per thousand live births. In terms of malnutrition, the numbers of those stunted and underweight are also quite high; and malnutrition if anything worsened over the — period. Again, since then the situation has moderately improved, though the rates still remain quite high.

And while the situation in relation to the number of children under 12 months, who had been fully vaccinated, improved over the — period, by nearly half of children in this age range still were not fully vaccinated. This suggests significant questions about the coverage or effectiveness of the health care system in Cameroon.

Fertility remains high in Cameroon, but decreased from 5. Education, however, improved significantly over this period; by the proportion of the population who had secondary education or more almost doubled compared to twenty years before. The number of households with access to electricity also increased substantially over this period, though there was a much more modest improvement in the proportion having access to an adequate drinking water source.

Ownership of durable goods did not increase much over this time, except for the percentage of households having a refrigerator, this presumably also being linked to the greater access to electricity. In short, many of these indicators give an impression of very slow improvement over most of this period, though the situation in relation to health indicators in particular improved more noticeably in recent years.

For the latter, the situation improved between and , but made limited progress between and The DHS indicators by contrast show least progress between and , but quite good progress between and However, this difference is not surprising; the surveys relate to different years, and consumption estimates in particular can be quite sensitive to the economic conditions when the surveys were carried out.

In addition, there is no reason why monetary and different non-monetary measures should show the same trends. We now turn to a disaggregated analysis of some of these indicators.

Subject to the availability of a vaccine at the beginning of and the gradual extinction of the COVID—19 pandemic from the second half of , the Cameroonian economy, buoyed by the recovery of the world economy and international trade, could return to prepandemic growth levels as early as Growth should reach 3. The external and internal account balances would also improve substantially. Inflation will be 2. This optimistic scenario could be undermined by a worsening of the security and sociopolitical crises at its borders and in two of its English-speaking regions, or if the pandemic does not subside by the middle of , which would cripple the restart of global growth.

Cameroon is a low middle-income country at two speeds: poverty and inequality are deteriorating in the northern regions notably the conflict prone North-West, while declining slightly in the rest of the country.

The sharp rural versus urban and regional disparities between the northern regions and the rest of the country persists. Furthermore, the Boko Haram conflict and renewed escalation of violence in Nigeria and Lake Chad region generated a renewed flow of refugees to the Far North region that hosts , Nigerian refugees. In the meantime, the recent conflict in the anglophone regions has a severe impact on both poverty and the already low Human Capital Index HCI 0.

It has been estimated that about 4. Cameroon also remains vulnerable to climate change, particularly in the North, which aggravates the pressure on the availability of already limited natural resources resulting in conflicts over land and water. Going forward, Cameroon will need to address these specific issues that, combined with poor quality of government services, weak governance, lack of empowerment of local government and communities and a sense of marginalization by a highly centralized state, are notably the common root causes of the ongoing conflicts.

To address these challenges, lending to date is in line with the Country Partnership Framework CPF FYFY21 and reflects strategic adjustments to enhance financing for the poorest and most fragile regions also supported by reforms through Development Policy Operations. Emphasis was deliberately put on activities that tackle: i abject poverty through expanded social safety nets, ii low rural productivity through agriculture and livestock projects ; iii poor access to economic and social services for improved health and nutrition, better education, and iv weak governance in a pragmatic way by targeting more efficient public expenditures and v poor service delivery by improving regulation in key sectors and increasing citizen engagement at the project level through the Community Development Program and financing mechanisms such as the Performance Based Financing in the health sector and education as a pilot.

Tailored implementation mechanisms have been developed to continue working in areas in active conflict in the Far North with the rehabilitation of the Mora-Dabanga-Kousseri road. Looking forward, the program will continue to place an emphasis on northern regions to consolidate the strong results achieved so far and adopt a tailored approach to the conflict in the anglophone regions.