The Minister of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, Social Economy and Handicrafts granted an audience to Her Excellency Dr. Corinna FRICKE, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Cameroon, on 11 October 2023 at his office. The German diplomat led a delegation of German entrepreneurs looking for investment opportunities in Cameroon.
The audience gave both parties the opportunity to discuss priority areas of interest to Cameroonian SMEs. The aim was to facilitate business-to-business exchanges, technology transfer and, above all, the acquisition of machine tools from Germany. These machine tools are used in the production of manufactured goods.
At the end of the meeting, Minister Achille Bassilekin III recalled that “we were talking about meeting the needs of Cameroonian households and businesses, and this is the challenge we are facing alongside Germany to bring our industrialisation drive to the levels we hope for”. He was keen to point out that it was a question of envisaging exchanges between companies and partners, in accordance with the promises of the Economic Partnership Agreements, Cameroon signed and of which Germany is a pillar country within the European Union, with assets in terms of the development of machine tool technologies.
For the Minister for SMEs and the German Delegation, it was a question of looking at concrete sectors to see how this technology transfer could be deployed, particularly in the agro-industry, processing, etc.
This large-scale meeting also gave the various personalities an opportunity to explore how some German companies invested in the maintenance of this equipment and active in Cameroon could play their part to the full.