Written By | International News Agencies
Cameroon enters the second half of 2026 with a macroeconomic profile that most of its neighbours would envy.
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Central Africa
Cameroon enters the second half of 2026 with a macroeconomic profile that most of its neighbours would envy. Public debt is moderate by regional standards, inflation is heading back toward the Central African monetary union's convergence band, the regional central bank is cutting rates, and the International Monetary Fund describes the outlook as "cautiously favourable." And yet the single most consequential economic event of the year in Central Africa's largest economy has not been a commodity price move, a financing deal or a policy reform. It has been a dispute over who is permitted to run the X-ray scanners at the Port of Douala.
That is not a footnote. It is the clearest available illustration of the constraint that now binds Cameroon's growth: not the availability of capital, but the reliability of the institutions that stand between capital and the real economy.
A recovery with a narrow margin
The IMF Executive Board concluded its 2026 Article IV consultation with Cameroon on 25 March 2026, publishing the assessment five days later. Staff estimated that the economy grew 3.1 percent in 2025 — slower than previously forecast — because election-related disruptions depressed trade, services and investment during October and November. Growth is projected to recover to 3.3 percent in 2026 on the back of higher public investment, with inflation easing to 2.9 percent. Over the medium term, as mining diversification materialises, the Fund sees growth reaching 4.6 percent and the current account deficit narrowing to about 4.0 percent of GDP from a projected 5.3 percent in 2026, the widening driven largely by softer cocoa prices.
The African Development Bank is somewhat more optimistic on the headline number, projecting 4.0 percent growth in 2026 and 4.1 percent in 2027, supported by agriculture, manufacturing and extractives, transport, public investment and public consumption. But the Bank's supporting detail is where the story sharpens. It expects the budget deficit to widen to 1.9 percent of GDP in 2026 before narrowing to 0.7 percent in 2027 — and it attributes that widening explicitly to stagnant government revenue arising from declining trade flows and, in its own words, from the crisis in container scanning operations at the Port of Douala. A regional development bank has, in effect, written an administrative dispute into its fiscal forecast.
The AfDB also expects inflation to rise to 3.5 percent in 2026 on higher oil prices before falling back to 2.7 percent in 2027, and the current account deficit to reach 4.1 percent of GDP in 2026 on rising import costs, narrowing to 3.9 percent in 2027 as the 2024–26 import substitution plan and local processing take effect.
The bottleneck at Bonabéri
Cargo scanning at the Port of Douala-Bonabéri has been disrupted since 1 January 2026. The dispute is structural rather than technical: two operators claim the right to inspect containers. The Swiss inspection firm SGS holds a contract that the Ministry of Finance maintains is legally binding until 2032. The Port Authority's director general announced that from 1 January 2026, scanning would instead be performed by Transatlantic D SA, which began operations on 2 January under a 25-year concession.
The resulting standoff has been costly precisely because it sits at the junction of physical infrastructure and information systems. Transatlantic operates the scanning equipment, but the national customs clearance software remains under the Ministry of Finance's jurisdiction and locked to the SGS platform. Importers have reported being asked to pay twice or accept indefinite delays. On 29 January 2026, Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute issued a formal instruction to halt the transition and maintain SGS in order to avoid economic damage — an instruction that port leadership reportedly did not follow. The Presidency subsequently intervened.
The stakes are quantifiable. The World Customs Organization's own coverage of the Douala scanning regime notes that the customs sector covering the port is central to Cameroon's overall revenue performance, and that persistent smuggling and counterfeiting have cost the treasury on the order of CFA 200 billion a year. A country attempting to raise non-oil revenue cannot afford an eight-month interruption at its principal revenue-collection point.
The fiscal arithmetic
The fiscal picture is otherwise unremarkable, which is the point. Cameroon's 2026 state budget was set at FCFA 8,816.4 billion, balanced between income and expenditure. Public debt stood at 44.2 percent of GDP at the end of June 2026 — high enough to require discipline, low enough to leave options. The IMF's preliminary read on 2025 was less flattering: the fiscal position weakened, with non-oil revenues underperforming and a slippage in current spending, and the 2026 stance is expected to tighten in response.
Regionally, conditions have loosened. At its second meeting of 2026, the Bank of Central African States raised its CEMAC growth forecast to 3.2 percent from 2.9 percent, projected a regional budget deficit of 1.9 percent of GDP, and revised the regional current account deficit sharply to 2.9 percent from 5.2 percent. BEAC cut its policy rate to 4.5 percent from 4.75 percent and lowered banks' reserve requirements. The Fund has nonetheless flagged that further erosion of CEMAC's pooled international reserves would heighten uncertainty and force additional adjustment — a reminder that Cameroon, as the bloc's largest economy, does not manage its external buffers alone.
The oil clock
Underneath the annual forecasts is a slower depletion story. Cameroonian oil production contracted 8.82 percent in 2025 for want of new investment projects. The AfDB's judgement is blunt: the combination of falling output and softer prices will weigh on export revenues, and neither higher cocoa prices nor growth in iron ore and liquefied natural gas production will be sufficient to compensate.
That is why the medium-term forecasts hinge on the word "diversification." President Paul Biya, re-elected in October 2025, set out five priorities for the new term: a special youth employment plan, continuation of major infrastructure projects, promotion of women's entrepreneurship and training, modernisation of public governance, and stronger international cooperation. The 2026 budget allocates CFA 50 billion to finance youth-led projects. Against a labour force in which citizens aged 18 to 35 make up 57 percent of the total, that allocation is symbolically clear and arithmetically modest.
The second ledger
The political context matters because it is the proximate cause of the 2025 slowdown. The Constitutional Council declared Biya the winner of the 12 October 2025 presidential election on 27 October with 53.66 percent of the vote. The leading opposition candidate, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, rejected the result, alleging fraud; four people were killed in Douala during protests by his supporters. The disruption to trade, services and investment that the IMF recorded in October and November was the economic shadow of that contest.
The household ledger has moved in the opposite direction from the macro one for two decades. Poverty reduction in Cameroon has stagnated over that period, with roughly four in ten Cameroonians below the national poverty line. The World Bank has warned that on current trends the extreme poverty rate could reach 25.0 percent in 2026, affecting approximately eight million people. Measured unemployment of about 9.8 percent in 2025, against 9.5 percent in 2024, understates the problem given the scale of informal employment. Afrobarometer survey work finds more than a third of young Cameroonians — 36 percent — unemployed and looking for work, against 11 to 28 percent across middle-aged cohorts, and six in ten young people saying they have considered emigrating.
Layered on top is a humanitarian account that has not improved. Violence and insecurity have displaced more than 2.2 million people, counting internally displaced people, returnees and refugees; roughly 510,855 were displaced by the Far North conflict as of May 2026, alongside the continuing Anglophone crisis in the North-West and South-West regions. Some 2.85 million people — over ten percent of the population — face crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity, and 2.9 million, including 1.5 million children, were expected to need humanitarian assistance in 2026. As of mid-August, only 26 percent of the funding required for the 2026 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan had been secured.
What to watch
Three markers will show whether 2026 was a recovery or a pause. The first is Douala: whether the scanning concession is resolved in a way that restores predictable clearance times, and whether customs receipts recover in the second half. The second is non-oil revenue as a share of GDP, the single number that determines whether the youth employment and infrastructure commitments are financed or merely announced. The third is the next household survey. Cameroon has demonstrated that it can hold a moderate debt ratio and a low inflation rate through a contested election and a commodity downcycle. What it has not yet demonstrated is that macroeconomic stability transmits to the eight million people the World Bank expects to be living in extreme poverty this year.
