People in Cameroon have money – it changes hands constantly – they just don’t have much of it. Women sell the crops that they don’t use to feed their family, but in because everyone is doing the same thing, prices are low. I think the problem is that no money is being created – although I don’t understand enough about economics to know for sure. For countries in the North, money is created by money being deposited into bank accounts and loans from those funds, and as long as there is a belief that it would get paid back eventually, credit continues to be distributed.
In Cameroon, no one has credit. No one has credit cards – it is a completely cash society. Some people have savings accounts, but they are expensive to open and have a minimum balance required. Money seems to come into the area mostly through Western Union, legally and otherwise. A major chunk of the money goes out of the area to beer companies, especially Guinness whose name is everywhere – even the main trail to the top of Mt. Cameroon is named “Guinness Trail”.
So I see the lack of credit as a big problem. There are so-called “microfinance institutions”, but even they have significant barriers to getting a loan – very different from what microfinance means in other countries. As if that was not enough, the government has some law which requires a huge amount of money to be deposited to start up your own microfinance institution – effectively barring small groups from providing loans for others, which would be the best way of alleviating poverty in the area. The existing for-profit “microfinance” probably companies bribed the government into enacting the law to force people to give them their business, which is short-sighted since a true MFI would create a market that could use them as the people got more money.
Of course, money is also coming into the country through outside aid agencies. But Cameroon is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, so little of the money actually makes it to the people it is intended for. Even if the corruption suddenly disappeared, the huge bureaucracy built up to get a piece of the pie would still remain. And no change is going to come in while the existing quote-democracy-unquote remains in the hands of Paul Biya, who has run it for over 25 years.
The cybercafé is another way people make money. Nigeria is not the only place where people try to scam people – it just has the most people. While I was sitting there yesterday, the person on the left was copying and pasting something about shi-tzu puppies to various sites using various different email addresses. It looked like he copied what someone else posted – so the grammar was good – and then put his own email address and put it in various places. The person on my right was sending an email to some organization claiming that he was deaf and wanted money. I suppose he could be deaf, since I didn’t talk to him, but I doubt it.
Cameroon, at least the Southwest region, is very fertile from the volcano. So while I’m sure people are hungry because they have no money to eat, food itself is abundant. The education system, however, does not seem to be good. I have seen some science textbooks, and most of it has to do with hygiene and HIV/AIDS – a good thing for people to survive, but not what people need to thrive.
The result is a dearth of critical thinking. Farmers grow what their parents grew, sell how their parents sold, and are expectedly in little better shape – except that everyone has a mobile phone. There is a risk in trying to do something different when your neighbor will just steal your profit and the corrupt police will likely not do anything about it. And the unexpectedly bright students leave the area because there are no high-paying jobs.
So in other words, it is difficult to see what could be done. Certainly there are certain local changes which would improve things for some people, but probably a new government would be necessary to change things, which is not going to happen any time soon. Until then, the people will sell the same crops as everyone else, petite trade the same goods as everyone else, and attempt to scam the Americans who unfairly have things better.
