Stakeholders discuss amelioration, legal regulation of income-generating activities.

According to the Manager of SBEC, Isidore Njinju Asongalem, the meeting had as aim bringing together people directly involved with these activities so they can discuss on how to better promote, ameliorate and regulate the sector, making it less informal, and more formal.

“In the course of implementing the power prosperity and economic freedom for women and youth, one of the arms was IGAs and we realised that this sector is highly informal with little government attention, compared to other countries,” Asongalem said. 

“We saw the need to bring together stakeholders so they can bring up policy and recommendations that can help ameliorate the conditions of those involved in this sector that can be considered as the engine of the economy,” he added. 

While pointing out that most of the stakeholders present were products from this sector, Asongalem added that with crisis and insecurity in some parts of the country, it is through IGAs that the environment can be made habitable for people.

“An environment without a moving economy will always be dormant, hence there is a need to encourage soft skill learning so IGAs can be a driver of economic development and produce more Cameroonians who can be wealth creators,” Asongalem said.

The Chief Executive Officer, CEO, and Founder of Gateway Africa, Timia Tandi, for her part, said IGAs go beyond poverty alleviation and building competences and skills, as they are a means of survival in a country where there are limited or no access to jobs.

“With Cameroon’s current realities, it is important that IGAs transition from just small informal activities to bigger firms and corporations, to be able to absorb a reasonable percentage of unemployed youth,” she said.

Recommendations 

The Coordinator of the France Africa Partnership for Co-development, Pauline Eyebe Effa, highlighted that IGAs are the support of the national economy. 

She said to make them more profitable, there is the need to change the way IGAs are approached and treated like small informal businesses and structure them through education, training and up scaling. 

This, she said, means taking them from the informal to the formal so they can become Small and Medium-sized Enterprises.

Pauline Eyebe added that IGAs will rapidly grow if they make use of digital marketing and the new opportunities offered by digitalisation. 

The need to put in place a legal and regulatory framework to better manage IGAs and guarantee their effective contribution to economic growth and job creation was also recommended by the stakeholders present.

The stakeholders equally highlighted the need to group these IGAs under different sectors, and bring them together as cooperatives, because with cooperatives there is financial and human resource power, which is a key requirement to develop IGAs.

To that effect, they called on government to facilitate the creation of cooperatives, and make the procedure less cumbersome.