Entrepreneurship: Coming Soon- One Stop Clearinghouse for Business Creation

Entrepreneurship: Coming Soon- One Stop Clearinghouse for Business Creation
It is set to see the light of day during the National Forum of Private Entrepreneurship and of SME/SMI which will be held December 6 and 7th, in Yaoundé.

It is an open secret; enterprise creation in Cameroon remains a hard slog both for nationals and for foreign investors. Without exaggerating, experts maintain that it would take almost 400 days for any entrepreneur to complete the administrative formalities required for the formal registration of a company. And among the causes of this administrative burden, an accusatory finger is quickly pointed at corruption, from actors in both the public and private sectors. The initiative for a national forum on entrepreneurship, with the backing of Pme-Impacts, a Cameroonian civil society organization, is born from this state of affairs. The forum is primarily geared towards putting in place a pilot one-stop clearinghouse for enterprise creation. The 10 day experience at the Palais des congrès in Yaoundé which takes place alongside this forum, would, according to its organizers, allow all the project backers to benefit from the administrative and financial facilities on a much shorter time frame. Given that one of the determining factor in enterprise creation remains the facilitation administrative procedures.

Even more , it would be an opportunity fro the president of Pme-Impacts, Christiane Mantey, “to inform project promoters about the existing modalities for enterprise creation, while trying to bring concrete solutions to the problems faced by entrepreneurs in the daily management of their activities”.

The National Forum on Entrepreneurship and for SME/SMI is hosted in collaboration with Projet Choc! (Changer d’Habitude, s’Opposer à la Corruption), upon recommendation of a mission from the members nations of the OECD(Organization Economic Cooperation and Development) to address corruption in Cameroon , in July 2006. It was championed by the prime Minister who by his involvement, according to organizers, his governmental team would be involved in the setting up of a true clearinghouse in 2008 through the intervention of the ministries of Justice, Finance, Labor and Social Security, of SMEs, and of the Social Economy and Crafts of the CNPS.