(Business in Cameroon) - The Cameroonian Minister of Public Works announced last January 23 the government is expecting to pave 700 km of roads this year. He was speaking at the opening of the biannual conference of the heads of central and decentralized services of his ministerial department.

“We must work more than in the past to find better ways to optimize the use of our resources, while being at the forefront of innovations in our sector, whether in construction or maintenance, to achieve more with less,” Emmanuel Nganou Djoumessi said. This means that despite the financial resources that are not always up to the needs, Cameroon intends not only to get closer to its performance in 2021 (778.6 km) but also to almost double the volume of work carried out in 2022. Official stats presented last November 25 by PM Joseph Dion Nguté to the National Assembly showed that only 395 km of new roads were paved in 2022. The year target was 492.2 km.

In addition to poor financial resources, Minister Emmanuel Nganou Djoumessi also cited the growing insecurity in some parts of the country, especially the crisis in the NoSo regions. He reported that asphalting work could not be carried out on about 44% of the Northwest’s road network due to the crisis.

If the government achieves its 2023 target, Cameroon would finally have more than 10,000 km of paved roads. At the end of 2022, the country officially had 9,539.5 km of paved roads, and the majority (92.5% in 2021) of its road network (121,884.7 km in 2021) is still unpaved.

Brice R. Mbodiam