Navigating economic development in Cameroon: Policy Trajectories from Independence to the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative Completion 1960-2006 (Emergences Africaines)

This book is an analytical compendium of Cameroon’s economic development policies, from 1960 to 2006. It opens with the country’s colonial economic experiences and proceeds with an analysis of its initial economic development guidelines in the early 1960s, fundamentally based on development planning and planned liberalism, executed through Five Years Development Plans.
Cameroon’s early development emphasis was on industrialisation, later deduced to be too costly and slow in spurring growth. Agriculture was thus endorsed in the early 1970s, as a primary strategy to boost real development in the country. It was in this backdrop that precepts like the green revolution, self-reliance development, food self-sufficiency and others were adopted.
The book rounds off with the different measures implemented by the Cameroon government, Bretton Woods institutions and others, to restore and sustain the country’s economy by 2006 and perspectives. It argues that while the principles underlying Cameroon’s economic development were resilient, they fell short of expected outcomes.

Professor George Fuh Kum is currently a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Yaoundé I, Cameroon. He is member of several learned societies both in Cameroon and abroad. His teaching and research interests have over the years, focused on aspects of economic and social development history during the colonial and post-colonial periods in Cameroon and Africa.