Integrated Development Issue (IDI)

Ngaoundéré marked our final classes of the semester, all that remains is our big individual research project for the last month of the program. We therefore spent most of the our time in the north preparing our research and presentations from our partner research project on a development issue that we’ve been working on for the past 8 weeks. My partner Lauren and I chose to do ours on the informal sector in Cameroon. When we started out the second week of September we really didn’t know where this topic would take us, but we came up with research questions that we hoped to answer. (How big is the informal sector, who are its workers, what are their backgrounds, how much education do they have, what motivates people to work there, what is its future, etc.) We started researching during our Dschang stay. We handed out questionnaires to vendors working on the street and in back alleys and pretty much everywhere because the informal sector here is enormous (90% of the working population.) We asked them our basic demographic questions to get a better picture of what the sector looks like from the people who work there. We then picked two to interview formally. We asked them about their lives and their families, their hopes and their difficulties. Through these interviews we started to understand that working in the informal sector is not a choice, it is a last resort. We heard over and over again ca ne suffit pas (this doesn’t suffice) or seulement pour survivre (only for survival.) People talked constantly about their hardships not as complaints, but as reality. So when we set up an interview with an economics professor in Dschang, we asked him about the advantages and disadvantages economically of having a large informal sector, and also what is next for this population. There are advantages, employment provider being #1, but the disadvantages far outweigh them, and thus formalization is desperately needed. The minister in Dschang reaffirmed this opinion but said that the government had no plans to foster this transition between the informal and formal sector. We returned to Yaoundé with the clear idea of continuing to study the need and potential of this transition. We interviewed another government official who was actually devising a method of accomplishing this, and we were really optimistic after our interview with her, but then we interviewed a microfinance organization who told us the government follows through with nothing here. Corruption permeates every department at every level, and disorganization is a fundamental trait of the government. We finished our research with an interview with a tailor, who told us over and over again that the government does rien (nothing.)

Our final paper and presentation revolved around this transition through the perspectives both of the government and of microfinance and the contradictory opinions they gave us. We concluded however, they while this debate goes on in air conditioned offices, thousands of people in Cameroon are suffering everyday, and it therefore doesn’t matter where the change comes from, as long as it comes. It is very doubtful however that it will come any time soon. We learned so much through this process about people. On average people make around $4 per day, they raise families on that, they pay for school on that, everything. Most people have only a primary school education and nobody is satisfied with their work. I now barter much less hard for goods and respect people working in the streets so much more.