5. Discussion
Cameroon is witnessing a historical increase in informality
mostly touching the non-farming sector. Its contribution to the GDP has evolved
from 22% in 1993 to almost 50% 12 years later. This sector provides 90.4% of
jobs in the country. Most of these jobs are precarious and casual. One of the
biggest issues that this sector faces is that, it doesn't have access to the
credit market; this hampers its process of comfortably evolving to the formal
sector. The PIAASI has an approach of promoting the informal sector by
allocating credits to selfemployment projects. We analyzed through this paper
how it would have been more efficient for the PIAASI to allocate funds to IUPs
according to their dynamism in order to accompany them in the formal sector
which is legally more advantageous (protection, credit access, accountability,
sales...) and in the long run, economically safer than the informal sector.
These advantages are mostly ignored by informal sector operators. Through the
scoring of IUPs, the Government could allocate them promoting funds that would
encourage small IUPs to gather and be more efficient in order to fulfill the
requirements and benefit from that unprecedented opportunity. The sectors of
the microfinance and banking could therefore treat more respectfully the IUPs
which otherwise pay huge interests for very few loans due to the high level of
risk that constitute their portfolio.
Acknowledgements
We thank the National Institute of Statistics (NIS) of Cameroon
which has granted us the data
and supervised us in partnership with the
«Institut Sous-regional de Statistiques et
d'Economie Appliquee» (ISSEA). We also thank Mr. GOUNE
TEKOMBONG Russel Romeo for his critical reading of this paper.
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