On March 25, 2026, the IMF Executive Board concluded the 2026 Article IV Consultation for Cameroon. The assessment presents an economy that is resilient but underperforming, growing at 3.3% in 2026 after slowing to 3.1% in 2025 when post-election unrest disrupted trade, services and investment in October and November. The medium-term outlook is more favourable: growth is projected to exceed 4% from 2028 and reach 4.6% by 2031, driven by the easing of electricity constraints and the start of large-scale mining production. The fiscal deficit widened from 1.5% of GDP in 2024 to approximately 2% in 2025, with the non-oil primary balance deteriorating to 2.6% of GDP against a budget target of 1.4%. The 2026 budget targets a deficit of 1.7% of GDP, consistent with the convergence criteria of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community. The debt sustainability analysis continues to classify Cameroon at high overall risk of debt distress.
The tension between the headline growth number and the underlying fiscal fragility is the analytical core. Cameroon’s economy is the largest in the CEMAC zone and the sixth-largest in sub-Saharan Africa. It has shown resilience to successive external shocks: the COVID pandemic, the 2022 commodity price spike, and the tightening of global financial conditions. But growth of 3.1 to 3.3% in an economy with a population growth rate of approximately 2.5% translates into per capita income gains that are barely perceptible. The IMF’s characterisation of growth as “below potential” reflects a structural underperformance that the Article IV identifies as rooted in four constraints: limited access to finance for the private sector, weak public investment planning and execution, electricity bottlenecks, and insufficient domestic non-oil revenue mobilisation.
The mining dimension is where the Article IV connects directly to the themes of this series. The IMF identifies the start of large-scale bauxite exports as a central element of the medium-term growth outlook. The Minim-Martap bauxite project in the Adamawa Region, operated by Canyon Resources through its subsidiary Camalco Cameroon, holds confirmed ore reserves of 144 million tonnes at 51.2% aluminium oxide. The project is positioned as a structural diversification play for an economy that has historically depended on oil (declining production), cocoa, timber and services. Iron ore, bauxite and other minerals represent a potential shift in the composition of Cameroon’s export base and fiscal revenue. The Article IV framework makes the connection explicit: medium-term growth projections above 4% are contingent on mining production materialising on schedule.
The fiscal architecture Cameroon operates within is the CEMAC convergence framework, the Central African equivalent of the WAEMU system documented in the IMF WAEMU review article. CEMAC imposes a 3% deficit ceiling and requires member states to converge toward shared fiscal targets. The 2026 budget’s 1.7% deficit target signals fiscal discipline after the 2025 election-related slippage. But the IMF notes that “some budget assumptions are rather optimistic” and that “budget implementation will be challenging.” The non-oil revenue underperformance documented in 2025, combined with current spending slippages that have been a recurring pattern, suggests that the fiscal consolidation path requires more institutional capacity than the government has historically demonstrated.
The three competing fiscal agendas are a structural feature that the Business in Cameroon analysis highlighted: Cameroon simultaneously serves the CEMAC convergence criteria, the IMF’s Article IV recommendations, and its own National Development Strategy (SND30), which targets average annual growth of 8%. The IMF projects 3.3%. The government targets 8%. The gap is not a forecasting disagreement. It reflects fundamentally different assumptions about what the economy can deliver, and the fiscal plans built on the 8% target allocate spending at levels that the 3.3% revenue base cannot support without borrowing.
The debt management dimension is where the IMF Board’s concerns are most pointed. Directors emphasised the need to strengthen debt management “given the high risk of debt distress.” The recommendation is specific: prioritise concessional project financing from development partners over expensive commercial borrowing. Cameroon has increasingly relied on domestic and regional debt markets, where financing costs are higher than concessional alternatives. The IMF notes liquidity constraints in the CEMAC domestic debt market that could “intensify pressures.” The sovereign-bank nexus, the same vulnerability identified in the WAEMU review of this series, applies in CEMAC: banks hold significant sovereign paper, and fiscal stress transmits to the banking sector. The IMF called for “continued vigilance in the financial sector amid elevated NPLs and the sovereign-bank nexus” and flagged concerns about the expanding state footprint in the banking sector.
The FATF grey list dimension adds a compliance pressure that affects Cameroon’s access to international financial flows. The IMF Directors called for “accelerating AML/CFT reforms” as “paramount for Cameroon to exit the FATF grey list.” Grey-listing increases compliance costs for international banks transacting with Cameroon, raises due diligence requirements for foreign investors, and creates a reputational signal that compounds the “high debt distress risk” classification. For mining companies evaluating investment in Minim-Martap or other projects, the FATF listing adds a compliance layer that does not exist in competing jurisdictions like Guinea, Ivory Coast or Ghana.
The electricity constraint is the operational bottleneck that the IMF identifies as the binding limit on growth in the near term. Cameroon’s power infrastructure, centred on the Songloulou and Edea hydroelectric plants supplemented by thermal generation, operates below national demand. Load-shedding affects industrial and commercial activity. The IMF’s growth projection of exceeding 4% from 2028 is explicitly conditioned on electricity constraints easing, a dependency that echoes the Eskom constraint in South Africa, the grid collapses in Nigeria, and the generation-without-transmission gap in Guinea, all documented in this series. Whether Cameroon’s power sector delivers the capacity additions that the growth projection requires is an infrastructure execution question, not an economic forecasting question.
For the series, Cameroon fills a Central African gap. The previous articles have concentrated on West Africa (gold belt, WAEMU zone, AES states, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria), East Africa (Kenya data centres, Ethiopia mining), Southern Africa (South Africa mining/Eskom, Mozambique LNG) and the DRC (copper, cobalt, critical minerals). Cameroon, as CEMAC’s largest economy, operates in a different institutional framework (CEMAC vs WAEMU, BEAC vs BCEAO, CFA franc BEAC vs CFA franc BCEAO) but faces structurally similar challenges: commodity dependence (oil declining, mining ascending), fiscal discipline under regional convergence pressure, sovereign-bank nexus risk, electricity constraints limiting growth, and the gap between development plan ambition and institutional delivery capacity.
The structural question the Article IV poses is whether Cameroon can execute the transition from an oil-and-agriculture economy to a mining-and-diversified economy within the fiscal constraints that the high debt distress classification imposes. The bauxite reserves are proven. The iron ore potential exists. The electricity investments are planned. The fiscal convergence target is set. But each of these requires capital deployment, institutional coordination and implementation capacity at a level that the 2025 fiscal slippage suggests is not yet consistently available. The IMF programme that concluded in July 2025 achieved partial results: some structural benchmarks were met, others delayed, and fiscal performance was weaker than in earlier reviews. Finance Minister Louis Paul Motaze has publicly called for a new IMF programme for 2026-2029. Whether the conditions of that programme are structured to support the mining transition while maintaining fiscal discipline will determine whether Cameroon’s medium-term growth projection is a credible trajectory or an aspirational baseline that the institutional environment cannot yet deliver.