There has been improvement in existing rules and policies though fruits are yet to be visible.

Over fifty years after independence with little to show in terms of investment, both local and foreign, the government of Cameroon appears to be moving from the traditional campaign of brandishing itself as an investment haven to addressing issues described by analysts as veritable impediments to investments. The country is richly blessed in natural resources of most, if not all, sectors but the investment climate has been variously rated as business-unfriendly.

Poised on staging a turnaround, government has been overhauling its programmes and policies to bring in as many investors as possible. At the Prime Minister's Office, there is the Prime Minister's Investment Council. The forum offers the State the opportunity to dialogue with the private sector in jointly seeking ways of improving the not-so-comfortable investment atmosphere. Against a backdrop of repeated criticisms on the lengthy and corruption-breed procedures to set up enterprises, the government recently created a One-Stop-Shop system for external trade to facilitate customs and maritime operations. In the same vein, government has created two pilot business set-up centres in Douala and Yaounde. There have also been efforts to ease the tax administration as well as the tax pressure by broadening the tax base. The creation of the Douala Stock Exchange market, which enables businesses to undertake stock exchange transactions and the putting in place of instruments like the investment, mining, gas and petroleum codes are among the steps taken to ease the hitherto hostile investment climate in the country. Also, enterprises still taking off are exempted from business licence for the first two years and there is the lowering of the threshold of value added tax (VAT) refund from FCFA 25 to 10 million to improve cash flow of enterprises, among others.

These measures, coupled with government's lobbying mechanism, are apparently responsible for the increasing number of economic prospection missions to the country of late. The Turks, Koreans and Italians came and saw but are yet to conquer. Prospection missions give the prospector a view of opportunities in place. Thereafter, he would certainly need to study what he saw and was told so as to be able to make concrete moves. But speeding up work on infrastructure projects in the country (the Lom Pangar and Memve'ele hydroelectric dams, the Bamenda-Enugu corridor road project as well as other national and sub-regional roads and the national optical fibre backbone project could give a better visibility of the country and probably cause many of these prospectors to consider taking a risk to invest here.