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Credit for the Common Man in Cameroon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Mark W. DeLancey
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and recently National Office for Scientific and Technical Research, Yaoundé

Extract

Complaints are frequently heard that the African farmer, the small trader, the everyday person has no means of getting the funds needed to improve his farm, to expand his trade, or to pay his child's school fees. It is often alleged that the low-literacy peasants and workers in a partially-monetised economy have no desire to save, even if there was any surplus money, and that in any case there are no institutions in which to accumulate or to redistribute their savings. It is argued that the banks fail to meet their needs because it is so difficult to obtain loans, while the private money-lenders, often operating illegally, almost always charge exorbitant rates of interest that discourage all but the most desperate of borrowers.

Type
Africana
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

Page 317 note 1 Source: Cameroon Co-operative Credit Union League, Eighth Annual General Meeting. Report (Victoria, 1976)Google Scholar, Table II. The yearly figures are in each case for March.

Page 318 note 1 These differences may be the result of variations in the average income of credit union members in the two Provinces, but such data are not available.

Page 318 note 2 Warmington, W. A., ‘Savings and Indebtedness among Cameroon Plantation Workers’, in Africa (London), XXVIII, 4, 10 1958, pp. 329–43.Google Scholar

Page 319 note 1 See Warrnington, loc.cit., Illy, Hans F., ‘Saving and Credit System of the Bamileke in Canieroon’, in Voss, J. (ed.), Development Policy in Africa (Bonn, 1973), pp. 293314Google Scholar, and Soen, D. and de Comarmond, P., ‘Savings Associations among the Bamuleke’, in Journal de la Socidti des africanistes (Paris), LXI, 2, 1971, pp. 189201.Google Scholar See also DeLancey, Mark W., ‘Institutions for the Accumulation and Redistribution of Savings among Migrants’, in the Journal of Developing Areas (Macomb), forthcoming.Google Scholar

Page 319 note 2 Meyer, Emmi, ‘Kreditringe in Kamerun’, in Koloniale Rundschau (Berlin), XXXI, 1940, pp. 153–21.Google Scholar

Page 322 note 1 See DeLancey, M. W., ‘Plantation and Migration in the Mt. Cameroon Region’, in Illi, Hans F. (ed.), Kamerun (Bonn, 1974), pp. 181236Google Scholar; Marguerat, Y., Analyse numérique des migrations vers les villes du Cameroun (Paris, 1975), p. 107Google Scholar; and E., and Ardener, S. and Warmington, W. A., Plantation and Village in the Cameroons (London, 1960), p. 435.Google Scholar