(Business in Cameroon) - As at June 30 this year, the implementation rate of projects featured by the government investment budget stood at 52.31%, while the resources commitment rate was 58.69% and the resources liquidation rate was 54.55%. Cameroon’s national supervising committee of Public Investment implementation said after a meeting held September 7 in Yaoundé.

Compared to the same period last year, this translates into a decline in the implementation of Government-funded projects (centrally managed and assigned funds), both financially and physically.

Considering “internal resources”, the commitment rate as at 30 June 2018 was 54.75%, compared with 69.86% in 2017, thus a decline by 15.11 points; the liquidation rate was 47.14%, down from 66.90% in 2017 (-19.76 points). The projects’ physical implementation rate was 38.37%, down from 52.83% in the same period in 2017 (-14.46 points).

“There are companies with very low financial capacities. Then, once they secure contracts, they fail to fulfil terms because of their weak financial capacity,” said Isaac Tamba, Managing Director of Economy. “There are some contracts which were awarded before we noticed that the service providers did not have the technical capacity to carry out the works,” he added.

Cameroon's State budget for 2018 is valued at CFA4,625.8 billion in commitment authorizations (CA) and CFA4,513.5 billion in payment appropriations (PA).

The total allocation for public investment is CFA1,403.8 billion in commitment authorizations and CFA1,291.5 billion in payment appropriations. Therefore, the government investment budget represents 28.6% of the State budget in payment appropriations, down from 36.3% in 2017 (-7.7 points).

Sylvain Andzongo