Maximise The Opportunity

Regard

The decision by the business cartel, GICAM, to create a capacity-building centre through which the organisation can conveniently work to sharpen the business skills of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, SMEs, signals better days for actors of the sector, which has been described variously as the livewire of the country’s economy owing to the number and calibre of the people it employs.

When one considers that SMEs reportedly make up 90 per cent of Cameroon’s economy but contributes approximately 36 per cent to her Gross Domestic Product, giving a push to efforts of the actors can only be timely.

Coincidentally, the GICAM centre is coming at a time government is redoubling efforts to ensure the robustness of the sector to attain already clearly defined development objectives. Having a centre where growth-inhibiting challenges could be identified and handled and performance-enhancement tips spelt out is certainly a new dawn for the country’s SMEs.

A good foundation indeed to put the actors and their actions on a path of growing business competition that is irresistible now, especially with globalisation. The centre equally augurs well for local entrepreneurs looking at the challenges of competitiveness heightened by Cameroon’s adherence to the Europe Union’s Economic Partnership Agreement.

Opening up the local market for the free entry of certain goods from Europe as well as export to the European markets could bring mix fortunes for local businesses depending notably on the quality of what they offer vis-à-vis their competitors. Such quality cannot be ascertained when local enterprises are ignorant of the exigencies of the international market and what is needed to live up to expectation.

The GICAM Capacity-Building Centre for SMEs is thus viewed as a window to the world for actors. Making good use of the centre should therefore be imperative. The fact that the centr...