The first results of the fourth Cameroon Household Survey (ECAM 4) for 2014 are out and officially published by the National Institute of Statistics.

Conducted on the basis of a monetary poverty line of FCFA 931 a day per adult, and calculated from average household consumption, the poverty incidence is said to have dropped by 2.4 per cent. The statistics indicate a poverty incidence of 37.5 per cent in 2014 against 39.9 per cent seven years back; that is 2007.

This reduction, the survey indicates, is below the rhythm recommended in the Growth and Employment Strategy Paper (GESP) and was not expected to enable the country reach the goal of reducing poverty by half in 2015 within the realms of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG). One is talking about a period that is past; 2007 to 2014 but whose results are expected to help shape the country’s policy, especially that which aims at scaling down poverty.

Without very much getting into the gimmicks of how scientific the survey is conducted, it is rather important to note that Cameroon Household Surveys serve as a veritable vector for the country’s policy formulation and above all implementation. The disturbing issue about the surveys is the timeliness which many fear are published late enough when policies have already been formulated based on considerations other than those of ECAM.

That notwithstanding, the objective of each country’s policy, Cameroon included, is to reduce poverty even though there exist several definitions of what poverty is all about. In all, the condition where people’s basic needs for food, clothing and shelter are not being met Poverty, economists says, are generally of two types: absolute poverty which is synonymous with destitution and occurs when people cannot obtain adequate resources to support minimum level of physical health and relative poverty when people do not enjoy a certain minimum level of living standard as determined by a government.

The drop in poverty rate between 2007 and 2014 is certainly a positive indicator. It is explained by the fact that the economy generated several thousands of employments, mainly in the tertiary sector where public administrations as well as public enterprises were more or less dynamic.

Even though this situation contributed to the drop in poverty, it happened mostly in urban areas. This, in the real sense means that policies must be tailored towards the rural population which in turn depends very much on the urban population considered to be bread winners. And too much dependence on the urban population equally renders them poorer.  

The report of the ECAM 4 states inter alia that the achievement of development goals set in the GESP requires a steady growth, a better distribution of the fruits from the growth by better targeting the poor persons so that they can firstly and massively benefit from the measures of social protection like the safety net project under experimentation in some localities of the country. It equally recommends the promotion of decent employment, notably in agriculture and industry as some of the efficient means to reduce poverty.