A step towards cooperative health clinics in Cameroon

6 May 2016

Creating a local health service at a reasonable cost and enabling the employment of young people who have recently qualified in healthcare and related professions having completed their studies at health training schools. These are the two objectives of a programme which is currently taking shape following a meeting with the Cameroon Health Minister.

The Pan-African Cooperative Conference (PCC) has established this programme within the framework of Padcoop 2012, which is the ten-year Pan-African action plan for the development of cooperatives. The PCC has been able to obtain an audience with the Cameroon Health Minister in order to put forward its proposals regarding the cooperative healthcare clinics.

According to the PCC’s website, “the Minister was pleasantly surprised to discover that cooperatives could work in the healthcare sector and are not limited to the conventional sectors of microfinance and agriculture”. Professor Owono, the Director of Care Services, was appointed to be the PCC’s representative in order to “ensure that the Ministry has a complete understanding of the programme proposal”. This is the first stage in the negotiations which could change the health sector in Cameroon.

Furthermore, although cooperatives in the agricultural sector have been highly developed in this country since the arrival of the first European colonisers towards the end of the 19th century, there still remains the major objective of achieving a similar level of development in the other sectors.

An international seminar will be held in the framework of this initiative under the title of “The promotion of healthcare cooperatives in Africa: a strategy to achieve the third objective of the sustainable development agenda”.

About the PCC:

The Pan-African Cooperative Conference (PCC) met for the first time in Benin in 1967 at the initiative of the cooperatives, the states and trade unions, with the support of the Afro-American Labor Center (CAAT) and was attended by representatives from 11 African countries. Since then, the number of member countries has risen to 20, namely: Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Comoros, Rwanda, Senegal and Togo.
Its main objective is to promote cooperative entrepreneurship “as an alternative and efficient way of combating poverty in a political, economic, legal and regulatory environment which is conducive to the development of this type of entrepreneurship.”