Cameroon, UNDP Announce New Partnership to Support SMEs

Cameroon’s Ministry of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises and the United Nations Development Programme plan to strengthen their partnership through the creation of an Entrepreneurship Support Exchange. The platform is expected to improve access to finance, support innovation and accelerate the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises across the country.

The initiative was announced as the government seeks to expand the contribution of SMEs to economic transformation, industrialisation and job creation under the National Development Strategy, NDS30. The platform is expected to bring together entrepreneurs, financiers, development partners and other stakeholders within the entrepreneurial ecosystem to facilitate business support services and investment opportunities.

According to MINPMEESA, the partnership will also focus on providing preferential financing for SMEs, promoting product certification for businesses and artisans, supporting the formalisation of economic activities and strengthening the legal framework governing start-ups.

The announcement comes as newly published figures from the ministry’s 2025 Statistical Yearbook show continued growth in Cameroon’s formal productive sector. The report indicates that the country had 569,208 formal economic units in 2025, of which 99.9% were SMEs, social economy organisations and artisanal production units. SMEs alone accounted for 472,208 active businesses, representing a 6.5% increase from 443,524 recorded in 2024.

Data from the yearbook also show that 16,845 new SMEs were registered nationwide in 2025. The country recorded nearly 90,000 projected jobs from newly created SMEs, social economy organisations and artisanal production units, with SMEs accounting for 88.4% of those expected jobs.

According to the yearbook, youth entrepreneurship continued to expand, with 42% of SMEs created in 2025 established by entrepreneurs under the age of 35, up from 36.4% in 2019. Women accounted for 33% of newly created SMEs, compared with 25% six years earlier.

The yearbook further reported 23,714 social economy organisations affiliated with local networks and 72,508 registered artisanal production units, highlighting the growing role of community-based and small-scale economic activities in the national economy.

Speaking during the presentation of the 2025 Statistical Yearbook in Yaounde, Minister Achille Bassilekin III identified three priority areas for sustaining growth and supporting Cameroon’s economic transformation.

“The first challenge is to further increase the contribution of the national productive sector to the objectives of the NDS30 through the development of productive value chains, local processing of raw materials and the strengthening of industrial and agro-industrial value chains. This momentum must intensify, and these are among the priority projects we have set for ourselves,” Achille Bassilekin III said.

The minister also highlighted the need to transform the informal sector into a stronger driver of inclusive growth and employment while reinforcing economic governance and statistical information systems to improve planning and public resource allocation.

Mercy Fosoh