IFAD in Country

IFAD in Cameroon

Since 1981 IFAD has financed nine projects and programmes in Cameroon.

Three programmes are now under way:

IFAD prepared its first country strategic opportunities programme (COSOP) for Cameroon in 1998, and it was followed by an update presented to the Executive Board in September 2007. IFAD’s new strategy for intervention in Cameroon is in line with the government’s poverty reduction and rural sector development strategies.

The aim of IFAD’s strategy in Cameroon is to improve living conditions for poor rural people, and it focuses on two major objectives:

building the organizational capacity and bargaining power of poor rural people and their organizations
achieving sustainable improvements in prospects for income-generating on-farm and off-farm activities of poor rural people, particularly women and young people.

Achieving the first objective will enable Cameroon’s poor rural people to take part in formulating, monitoring and evaluating rural development policies, and to lobby public authorities to respond to their needs. This objective also promotes good governance and increased negotiating power among poor rural people in their dealings with merchants, who are generally better informed about market conditions.

The second objective is to facilitate poor people’s participation in economic life in order to raise their incomes. The aim is to make Cameroonian products more competitive on markets nationally, regionally (within the Central African Economic and Monetary Community) and internationally, by improving soil fertility and water management. IFAD’s interventions in Cameroon will also endeavour to boost agricultural productivity through better access to adapted technologies and services. They will focus on promoting off-farm small enterprises and microenterprises as well as financial services adapted to the needs of rural people to enable them to invest in productive activity.

IFAD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the French cooperation agency have together undertaken a project in support of African agriculture (P3A) to assist Cameroon and other countries in the region improve their agricultural policies.

Source: IFAD

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