Cameroon faces home truths
A SERIOUS HOUSING SHORTAGE HAS LED CAMEROON'S PUBLIC HOUSING COMPANY, SIC, INTO FORMING JOINT VENTURES WITH NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES

Gilles Belinga General Director of Société Immobilière du Cameroun

Cameroon’s government anticipates it needs to build at least one million homes to house its population adequately. The state-owned Société Immobilière du Cameroun (Cameroon Real Estate Company or SIC) was founded in October 1952 and is the centrally funded company responsible for solving the public housing problem. It also works in partnership with local private construction companies in order to handle large scale projects and to train the local workforce of engineers and technicians.
The authorities hope to attract foreign investors to the booming construction sector. “Our needs today stand at nearly one million homes but for the major cities such as Douala and Yaoundé we need at least 300,000 homes. The rest will be constructed all over the country,”comments the General Director of the SIC, Gilles Belinga.

OPEN HOUSE SIC is organizing building tenders through a bidding process open to national and international companies.

Although he was trained as an engineer, Mr Belinga gained investment experience in the country’s banking sector before being in charge of the Cameroon Model Corporation. He has also been director of the Hilton Project. “I
supervised its design and construction and when I finished, I was appointed to the Cameroon Real Estate Company.” Today, Mr. Belinga sees his responsibility as providing social housing and managing real estate resources in such a way that a greater number of Cameroonians can own their own homes.
“When you want to make social accommodation you need a state contribution, and so interested investors must work with the government. We are looking at the United States model where the government brings in 80% of the funding and the individual contribution is 20%,” he says. International aid companies have helped fund housing projects in the past. To maintain the current boom, the SIC is seeking to attract private construction partners as far away as the U.S., but more realistically, such joint ventures will come from within the country’s own home-grown construction sector. “Our objective is to build 100,000 homes in the next 5 to 10 years and we need private operators to achieve this”, comments Mr. Belinga, adding that the state will organize tenders through a bidding process open to national and international construction companies.

Emmanuel Mukam President of Cacoco

One of the main private and local construction companies particularly interested in this ambitious program is Cacoco (Compagnie africaine de conception et de construction en bâtiments et travaux publics). Cacoco was founded in 1985 and began as a subcontractor for major international companies. It then moved on to the building of municipal and industrial equipment before managing large scale projects, such as the headquarters of the company Cellucam at Edea and the Hevecam complex near Kribi.
Cacoco’s president, Emmanuel Mukam, prides himself on its business-like, disciplined approach. “We care for quality and devote a lot of time to the training of our workforce”, points out this engineer who spent eight years working for foreign companies before setting up his own company. The reputation of Cacoco has led the company to handle projects abroad. It is now working on a project in Mali where “thirty of our engineers and technicians are training local teams”, points out Mr. Mukam.

In spite of its successes on both the national and international markets, Cacoco still lacks capital and, like many companies in Cameroon, it is looking for new partnerships. “Our funds are not yet solid,” points out Mr. Mukam. “We would like to be attached to a bank, to materials manufacturing companies, and to real estate promotion companies, in order to grow sufficiently and become a full fledged building industry.”