Cameroon Counted the Investors It Already Had

On June 9, in Yaounde, Cameroon's Investment Promotion Agency and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization put out a 144-page report that read less like a brochure than an audit. Its subject was the investors Cameroon already has: 75 foreign-invested firms employing more than 24,000 people, many of them in the country for over two decades. The headline that travelled was the $166.8 million these firms plan to reinvest. The number that should have travelled is the $86.1 million they had already put back in, without anyone bidding for it.

Reinvested earnings are one of the least glamorous and most reliable sources of foreign investment. Across the world they make up roughly a third of inward FDI, and they arrive without an incentive auction, a site visit or a competing bid from the next country over. A firm already operating has sunk its costs, hired its people and learned the market; expanding is cheaper for the investor and far cheaper for the agency to land than a cold greenfield pitch. And yet almost every promotion agency budgets, staffs, and measures itself around attraction, and treats the investors already inside the fence as someone else's job.

The Cameroon survey is useful because it puts a shape on the gap. The report put 84% of the firms in its high-confidence bands, and nearly seven in ten said they intended to expand, but only 44% had a formal investment plan on paper. The export picture was starker: 73% operate in tradable sectors, yet just 23% export with any regularity. Confidence is abundant and cheap. A concrete, financed, permitted plan is scarce and expensive, and the distance between the two is the work an aftercare officer is supposed to do.

Retention risk in Cameroon is also concentrated, which cuts both ways. Nearly half the surveyed firms qualified as strong anchors, and that group accounts for more than 92% of the jobs in the sample. Lose two or three of them and the national numbers move; keep them growing and a handful of expansions does more than a year of missions. The agency's interim head was candid that the firms wanted more from him: better aftercare, and stronger engagement from the ministries, customs, and utilities an investor has to navigate to turn an intention into a factory line.

Ghana shows what it looks like to build that instinct into an institution rather than a survey. Its promotion center runs a standing Aftercare Division, recently folded an investor-grievance function into it, and took home the Excellence in Aftercare Award at this year's WAIPA world investment conference. Copy the grievance channel. Retention problems almost always surface as complaints, about a permit, a tax refund, a power connection, long before they surface as a quiet decision to expand in a different country.

None of this requires a new agency or a bigger incentive budget. The survey itself is the cheap first move: it produces a ranked list of firms that want to grow and the specific barriers, standards, logistics, forex, permits, that are keeping their plans off paper. Pair that list with an export-readiness track and the same reinvesting firm that only sells at home becomes a firm that ships. Pull your 20 largest existing investors by employment, call them, and ask the two questions the Cameroon survey asked: are you planning to expand, and what is stopping you.