Government Obtains New 51.7 Billion Loan to Revive CDC

The government of Cameroon has just secured fresh funding to breathe new life into the operations of the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC), the country’s largest agribusiness. According to a public-debt report for end-September 2025, the state is preparing to sign two loan agreements worth a total of CFA 51.7 billion with Standard Chartered Bank: a 47.06-billion-CFA buyer’s credit and a 4.67-billion-CFA commercial loan to finance the construction of new industrial facilities for rubber processing and palm-oil (and margarine) production.

The two loans, authorised under decrees signed on 22 September 2025 by Paul Biya, empower his Minister of Economy, Alamine Ousmane Mey, to contract the financing on behalf of the State, which remains the sole shareholder of CDC.

This new borrowing comes on top of recent efforts to restore the company’s financial health and social obligations. In mid-September 2025, the government cleared CFA 15.7 billion in salary arrears owed to almost 20,000 CDC employees, part of a wider CFA 35.7 billion debt accumulated between 2018 and 2022. Earlier, in 2024, the state had already injected funds to address part of the social debt and even assumed CDC’s tax obligations, integrating them into the company’s capital structure to stabilise its operations.

For years a key pillar of Cameroon’s agro-industry and the country’s second-largest employer after the civil service, CDC was severely affected by sociopolitical turmoil in the Anglophone regions beginning in 2018. From 2019 to 2021, the firm recorded losses of CFA 38.7 billion and saw its workforce shrink from roughly 22,000 to about 15,000.

With this new loan, the government signals its determination to restore CDC’s industrial capacity through the construction of modern processing plants and to revive employment and productivity in the rubber and palm-oil sectors, critical value chains for Cameroon’s rural economy. The coming months will reveal whether this infusion of capital will enable CDC to regain its status as a leading agribusiness actor in the country.

MMI News