Cameroon: African Development Bank provides €63 million loan to improve entrepreneurship and industrial skills | African Development Bank Group

The Board of Directors of the African Development Bank Group has approved a €63.09 million loan to Cameroon to promote entrepreneurship and improve skills to meet industry needs.

Multinational partners, the private sector and the Cameroonian government will contribute approximately €2 million to the project costs, estimated at €64.93 million.

Covering five regions of Cameroon – Centre, Littoral, South, Southwest and Far North – the project will improve skills and promote entrepreneurship and employment for youth and women in construction, transport, energy, agro-industry, ICT and the green economy. In particular, the project will directly strengthen 12 training centers and nine public and private entrepreneurship support facilities.

A lack of skilled labor in Cameroon threatens the country’s industrialization process and the development of its economic growth. The project aims to involve the private sector in Cameroon – in cooperation with the government – ​​in key structural measures: building technical and vocational training infrastructure and strengthening the capacity of stakeholders and the education system.

The private sector will contribute through three levers: the delegated management of vocational training centres, the establishment of a Fund for the development of vocational training and the financing of private initiatives supported by the Youth Project Development Support Mechanism, and the establishment of a network of incubators active in promising sectors.

This should lead to a higher quality of learning that is well suited to the labor market. It will promote self-employment and professional integration for young people, especially in targeted growth sectors, and strengthen the institutional capacities of technical and professional stakeholders.

Two of the five regions in the project area have been affected by conflict: the southwest (Anglophone crisis) and the far north (terrorist attacks by Boko Haram). The project will help to improve young people’s and women’s access to work and better paid activities. This will reduce the potential appeal of terrorist movements and bring about peace, improving living conditions and economic growth in Cameroon.

The project will benefit 7,350 young people in apprenticeships by enhancing training courses that meet labor market needs, and 1,225 young entrepreneurs or project leaders across the five regions, who will be enrolled in an incubation program until they start their business .

The project will also have a major impact on Cameroon’s socio-economic development. It could create 28,000 additional jobs by 2050 (an average of 1,120 per year between 2027 and 2050).

The Bank’s financing is driven by the need to support Cameroon’s strategic efforts to reduce the shortage of skilled labor in priority sectors.

The project aligns with Cameroon’s National Development Strategy 2020-2030 (NDS30) and two priority areas of the Bank’s Country Strategy Paper 2023-2028 for Cameroon: infrastructure development to promote the agro-industrial sector and strengthening human capital and governance to the institutional and business framework. It is also in line with one of the bank’s ‘High 5’ strategic priorities – improving the quality of life for the people of Africa – and its new ten-year strategy for 2023-2032, which is currently being finalised.