(Business in Cameroon) - This day June 21, 2018, during the meeting of the steering committee of CEMAC’s economic and financial reform programme Pref-Cemac, the economy and finance ministers of the CEMAC zone will meet the general managers of companies exploiting natural resources within the community.
According to the president of the steering committee, this meeting which is a first within CEMAC will namely help explore solutions for “the necessary replenishment of foreign exchange reserves with the participation of actors of the private sector”.
Indeed, according to IMF, CEMAC’s foreign exchange reserves in the French treasury dipped by CFA4 trillion within 6 years (CFA6,000 billion in 2010 to CFA2,000 billion in 2016). Therefore, to rebuild the zone’s foreign exchange reserve which is used to pay CEMAC’s imports, a crisis meeting was held in Yaoundé in December 2016. At the end of this meeting, the heads of states issued various measures to be implemented by each individual states as well as the BEAC.
On September 28, 2017, Louis Paul Motaze, Cameroon’s finance minister was delighted with the results of these measures. “When we review the result of the implementation of some of the measures which were taken, we notice that the volume of foreign reserves has risen but not yet at the level we want”, he said during the third meeting of the steering committee of Pref-Cemac in Douala.
Brice R. Mbodiam