A new International Monetary Fund report has laid out a targeted reform agenda to redirect Cameroon's banking system toward productive private investment. Published in April 2026 as Selected Issues Paper IMF SIP/2026/030 and titled Unlocking Growth in Cameroon: Easing Financial Sector Constraints and Closing Infrastructure Gaps, the paper was prepared by four IMF economists using data from 88 economies and identifies reforms capable of raising long-run income per capita by approximately 28 percent.
The paper finds that a decade-long shift in lending patterns has starved private businesses of credit — and calls for five structural reforms to reverse it: establishing a functional credit bureau, recapitalising banks, reducing their reliance on government securities, modernising collateral rules to help SMEs borrow, and launching a dedicated SME guarantee fund. Better financial access alone could account for a 17-percentage-point gain in long-term income per capita; improved electricity access would add a further 11 percentage points.
Three decades of declining lending
The IMF's diagnosis draws on three decades of data. The share of bank lending flowing to private businesses fell from 26.4 percent of GDP in 1990 to just 14.1 percent in 2023 — roughly one-third of the Sub-Saharan African average. Countries that started the 1990s at similar levels, including Colombia, Indonesia, and Bolivia, have all moved sharply in the opposite direction. Over the same period, the share of bank assets tied up in government securities climbed from 2.3 percent in 2010 to around 30 percent by 2025, a shift the IMF warns carries "ongoing risks to financial stability."
What credit does reach businesses is expensive and short-term. Average lending rates sit at 8.7 percent — more than three percentage points above the regional policy rate — and around 90 percent of all loans mature in under two years. Financing beyond ten years accounts for just 2 percent of total lending.
Firms that cannot afford to grow
These conditions show up directly in firm-level data. In 2024, 91 percent of Cameroonian firms employed fewer than 50 workers, and half had fewer than 10 — a pattern that holds regardless of how old the company is. The IMF is explicit: firms are not staying small because they are young, but because they cannot access the finance to grow. The share of businesses naming access to finance as their biggest obstacle nearly doubled, from 15 percent in 2009 to 29 percent in 2024, according to World Bank Enterprise Survey data.
As the paper puts it: "These financing patterns help explain the prevalence of persistently small firms and constrain the inclusiveness and productivity of private-sector growth."
The IMF also finds that Cameroon's 2024 GDP per capita was already around 6 percent below what its economic fundamentals should be delivering — a gap attributed to weaknesses in governance, policy execution, and resource allocation.
Mercy Fosoh