Story, Louvier Kindo Tombe
On a quiet morning in Yaoundé’s Hôtel Franco, policy experts, civil society leaders and agriculture practitioners gathered on November 24, 2025, to talk markets, numbers and policy. But behind the statistics discussed at the working session organized by the Cameroon Economic Policy Institute (CEPI) of the Henri Kouam Foundation lay a far more human story, that of thousands of Cameroonian women whose lives revolve around cassava, yet who remain locked out of its real economic promise.
Cassava is everywhere in Cameroon. It feeds families, sustains rural households and anchors local diets. And in most farming communities, it is women who plant it, harvest it, carry it and sell it. Yet, as CEPI’s working session revealed, the system they operate in is deeply broken.
For many rural women, cassava farming is as physically demanding as it is financially unrewarding. During the session, value-chain specialist Stella Achu painted a stark picture: fresh cassava roots are bulky, highly perishable and costly to transport. Without proper roads, storage or processing facilities, farmers — mostly women — are forced to sell quickly and cheaply or watch their produce rot.
Fuh Jarvis, another expert at the meeting, added a troubling detail: between 45 and 60 percent of cassava transported from rural areas to markets is still carried on heads or backs. In villages across Cameroon, this burden falls disproportionately on women, who walk long distances with heavy loads, often earning little in return.
“This is not just an infrastructure problem,” one participant noted quietly. “It is a social one.”
Markets That Exclude
Henri Kouam, President of the Henri Kouam Foundation, opened the session with a sobering diagnosis. Marketing efficiency among cassava retailers stands at just 14.20 percent a figure that reflects high transaction costs, losses and inefficiencies throughout the system. For women traders, this inefficiency translates into shrinking margins and growing vulnerability.
Most women operate in informal markets, without access to credit, formal contracts or stable buyers. They absorb the risks of price fluctuations, spoilage and poor transport, while consumers pay more and industries look elsewhere.
Yet amid the challenges, the session highlighted a powerful opportunity: value-added processing. Agro-entrepreneur Nshom Nelson argued that Cameroon’s cassava future does not lie in selling fresh roots, but in processing them into flour, starch and other industrial inputs.
Tassah Ivo, a CEPI research fellow, underscored the scale of the opportunity. Cameroon’s industrial demand for high-quality cassava flour stands at about 60,000 tons per year, driven by the food and beverage industry. Domestic production, however, barely reaches 500 tons annually. The gap is filled by imports.
For women, this gap represents more than lost revenue, it is lost empowerment. Processing offers higher incomes, longer shelf life, better prices and entry into formal markets. With the right support, women-led cooperatives and small enterprises could supply industries, stabilize prices and create jobs within their communities.
When Policy Meets People
The policy recommendations emerging from the working session took on new meaning when viewed through a gender lens. Calls to formalize retailers into cooperatives could help women pool resources, access credit and negotiate fairer prices. Investments in rural feeder roads — including CEPI’s recommendation to grade 1,500 kilometers annually — would reduce reliance on head-loads and ease women’s daily burden.
Equally important is the push to establish national quality standards for processed cassava products. Formal standards would open doors to industrial buyers and guarantee stable off-take prices — a game changer for women entrepreneurs seeking predictability and growth.
As the session ended, one message was clear: unlocking Cameroon’s cassava value chain is not just about markets and policies. It is about people — and especially women — whose labor sustains the system but whose potential remains underutilized.
If Cameroon succeeds in building strong, formalized and inclusive markets, women will no longer be confined to carrying cassava on their heads. They could own processing units, manage cooperatives and supply national industries.
In that future, cassava will no longer symbolize hard labor with little reward. Instead, it could become a pathway to dignity, entrepreneurship and shared prosperity for Cameroonian women.
