Cameroon is not short on workers. It is short on work that works. Each year, thousands of young people enter an economy with few formal jobs and even fewer clear pathways into productive employment. Most end up in the informal sector, not by choice but by necessity, where income is unstable, protections are absent, and survival replaces growth as the organizing principle. With nearly 90 percent of the workforce operating informally and only about 11 percent paying taxes, the state is left trying to plan, regulate, and tax an economy it barely sees. Digital has become the buzzword for addressing youth unemployment.
In August this year, the Northwest Digital Innovation Hub was established, led by the Northwest Regional Assembly in collaboration with Camtel, the North-West Development and Investment Fund (NOWEDIF), and the Northwest Digital Association (NOWEDA). The initiative is part of the Regional Assembly’s five-year (2022–2027) Development Plan, valued at 2.155 billion FCFA. Of this amount, 1 billion FCFA is allocated specifically to Digital Entrepreneurship, with the stated aim of fostering startup growth and digital innovation, and supporting technology infrastructure.
On paper, the ambition is unmistakable. The program promises to support 5,000 startups over a ten-year period and generate more than one billion dollars in total capital and revenue.
The initiative began with a six-month intensive Digital and AI Upskilling Program, enrolling 100 carefully selected young people in its first cohort. Participants receive hands-on training, monthly stipends, social protections, including health insurance and pension contributions, and pathways to job placement or startup creation. The immediate targets are equally bold: the creation of 25 fully operational startups and more than 1,000 direct jobs with competitive starting salaries.
I watched the startup pitches.
The ideas spanned a wide range of sectors: digital health platforms, educational tools, enterprise software, mobility applications for ticketing, logistics, and urban transportation; fintech and blockchain products; cybersecurity solutions; agribusiness and food-processing ventures; renewable-energy and hardware startups producing solar systems, inverters, CNC machines, and recycling technologies; and digital marketplaces built around trusted commerce and vendor verification.
After more than ten years of engaging with tech entrepreneurs and tracking innovation in Cameroon, I found none of these ideas to be new. I have seen them all before. Some have launched. The overwhelming majority, well over 95 percent, have failed to achieve commercial viability.
Taken together, these initiatives reveal an ecosystem rich in ideas and problem awareness, yet one in which innovation emerges in many directions at once. It is an ecosystem driven more by founder intuition, donor signals, and global technology trends than by clearly articulated national or regional technological priorities.
This is not unique to the Northwest Innovation Hub.
Last year at the Cameroon International Tech Summit hackathon in Yaoundé, I interacted with more than fifteen startup teams. Many of these ideas had not even completed basic customer discovery. For example, one team was developing a job board in an economy where almost 90 percent of the workforce is in the informal sector. This structural reality should have significantly shaped their strategy, yet they were trying to build an Indeed.
Innovation hubs, as they are currently structured, tend to reward novelty, ambition, and presentation quality rather than solutions to clearly defined problems with identifiable users and ready consumers. When public funding, especially government funding, is involved, it should be tied to well-defined objectives and, more importantly, to concrete outputs.
This brings us to a recent and revealing policy decision.
The Douala city government recently announced a partnership with the European Union to equip 20,000 motorcycle taxi drivers with digital vests. Embedded with QR codes and professional identifiers, the vests add a layer of digital accountability to one of the city’s most vital transport sectors. Beyond identification, the system enables real-time tracking and structured tax collection, with the stated aim of transforming a largely informal trade into a more professional service, thereby improving passenger safety and easing urban traffic management.
I will not assess this policy experiment on the merits of its design. Instead, I will ask a more fundamental question: is this not precisely the kind of problem that one of Cameroon’s innovation hubs should have been tasked with solving? Is this not how jobs are created while addressing real, persistent economic challenges?
On the surface, both the digital vest initiative and the innovation hubs fall neatly under the banner of the National Development Strategy 2030. In practice, they reveal what the strategy lacks most: a unifying logic that links problems to solutions and solutions to one another.
Instead of importing EU-funded digital vests, Cameroon’s innovation could have been tasked with building them. The problem was already clear: an informal transport sector, safety risks, weak data, and ineffective tax mechanisms. The technological requirements were equally clear: identification, tracking, payments, and data integration. This should have been framed as a national challenge and issued as a concrete brief to local developers.
Innovation hubs could then organize coordinated teams focused on mobility-tech, civic-tech, and gov-tech objectives. Startups would be selected or guided to meet these needs, rather than left to pursue abstract notions of “innovation.” The state would serve as the first customer—guaranteeing demand, piloting solutions, and refining them locally. Skills development, job creation, and formalization would occur simultaneously rather than as parallel, disconnected efforts.
In such a model, formalization follows productivity rather than the other way around. Taxation targets value creation rather than survival labor. Innovation hubs become extensions of public problem-solving capacity rather than symbolic showcases of modernity. Foreign aid amplifies local capability rather than replacing it.
Cameroon lacks neither plans nor talent. It suffers from fragmentation.