Cameroon has outlined plans to invest 1,748 billion FCFA across three iron ore projects as part of its 2026-2030 mining strategy. The projects are Mbalam at 747 billion FCFA, Bipindi-Grand Zambi at 570 billion FCFA, and Kribi-Lobé at 431 billion FCFA. Mining permits have been issued and operations are scheduled to start in 2026. Together, the planned outlays exceed the average annual budget for major projects over the past decade.
The timing is not coincidental. Oil revenue is projected to fall to CFA 612.5 billion in 2026 and drop further to CFA 580.6 billion in 2027, according to Cameroon’s Economic and Budget Programming Document. The decline reflects ongoing contraction in oil production from aging fields. Despite this, the extractive sector as a whole still contributed 4.9 per cent of GDP, 11.9 per cent of government revenues and 31.3 per cent of exports in 2024. The gap that oil is beginning to leave is the space that iron ore is meant to fill.
The three projects and their distinct logics
Each deposit has a different operator, timeline and infrastructure dependency.
Mbalam is the largest and most complex. Cameroon Mining Corporation, the concession holder, plans to move more than 80,000 tons of ore to the deep-water port of Kribi by March 2026. In the initial phase, transport will be carried out by road through 2029 using trucks with a net axle load of 75 tons. This road-based system is meant to allow shipments to begin before the dedicated rail and port infrastructure is fully operational. The operating plan calls for annual output of up to 10 million tons of iron ore between 2026 and 2029. In a second phase, from 2030 to 2050, exports are expected to reach 25 million tons per year, supported by the Mbalam-Kribi rail corridor. That corridor involves the construction of a 510-km railway dedicated to transporting iron ore from the Mbalam mine to the Cameroonian coastline, along with a 70-km railway linking the network to the Nabeba mine in the Republic of Congo.
Bipindi-Grand Zambi moved from concept to operations on September 22, 2025. Prime Minister Dion Ngute inaugurated the Bipindi-Grand Zambi Iron Ore Project at a ceremony in Kribi, attended by a high-level government delegation and traditional authorities. Controlled by Cameroonian billionaire Dieudonné Bougne, G-Stones Resources holds a 14-year mining permit for the deposit. Official reserves are estimated at 150 million tons with an average grade of 29.45 per cent. Five banks have backed CFA 41 billion in financing to support annual production of 1.3 million tons of iron ore concentrate for export. The company already has 600,000 tons of raw ore stockpiled on site for processing.
Kribi-Lobé is the infrastructure-heavy bet. Implemented by Sinosteel Cameroon SA, a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned company, the project holds estimated reserves of 632 million tonnes and is expected to generate significant revenue for the state. The mineral terminal to be built by Sinosteel will enable shipment of up to 14 million tonnes of iron concentrate, with potential for future expansion. The foundation stone for that mineral terminal was laid at Kribi on the same day the Bipindi-Grand Zambi inauguration took place, in September 2025.
The infrastructure constraint that defines the ceiling
The three projects share one structural dependency: the Kribi deep-water port. Exports of enriched cargoes have been expected since 2025 through the deep-sea port of Kribi, which does not yet have a dedicated mineral terminal. Port officials say existing terminal facilities can handle initial shipments. That stopgap arrangement works at low volumes. It does not scale.
The Mbalam timeline makes this explicit. Road haulage runs until 2029, then rail takes over. The rail corridor is the condition for the second-phase volumes that justify the project’s economics at scale. Until that infrastructure is built, the financial case for Mbalam rests on a transport model that is expensive, capacity-constrained and not designed for 25 million tons annually. The same logic applies across the portfolio: the projects can start exporting in 2026, but their full revenue potential is gated by infrastructure that will take at least four more years to complete.
Reading the fiscal strategy
With oil output declining, Mines Minister Fuh Calistus Gentry has forecast the launch of 15 mining projects by 2027. Iron ore is the anchor of that programme, but it is not the whole of it. Major sites including Mbalam, Kribi-Lobé, and Minim-Martap bauxite are in advanced development or pre-production. Over the next two years, mining operations are expected to intensify with initial export phases on several large projects, attracting increased foreign investment.
The Mining Code adopted in December 2023 represents a major overhaul of the sector’s legal framework, including the creation of development funds for geological mapping, environmental rehabilitation and local capacity building, and strengthened regulation of mining titles and classification of strategic resources. The legal framework revision matters because the previous code had been identified as a deterrent to investment.
The fiscal arithmetic, however, is tight. Between 2010 and 2025, the government committed 7,579 billion FCFA in external financing for infrastructure. Public debt servicing reached 824 billion FCFA in 2024. The challenge is to convert these investments into export revenue. Three iron ore projects starting in 2026 represent the beginning of that conversion, not its completion. The 2026-2029 road-haulage phase for Mbalam will generate export volumes, but at costs that compress margins. The fiscal upside the government is counting on requires the rail infrastructure that arrives only in the second phase.
What Yaoundé is executing is a sequenced bet: start exports now to demonstrate progress and generate initial revenue, while building the infrastructure that unlocks scale. The risk in that sequence is that the infrastructure phase faces the same delays that have characterised Cameroon’s mining ambitions for the past decade — delays that, in the Mbalam case, already shifted the first export timeline from 2025 to early 2026.