Investing in Cameroon: Navigating the Legal Framework for Cross-Border Investment

A September 2026 Paris conference on investment in Africa placed particular focus on Cameroon, highlighting how legal certainty has become a threshold condition for cross-border capital. A parallel initiative to formalise collaboration between Cameroonian and international law firms reinforced the same point: legal strategy belongs at the start of an investment, not at the point where a dispute arises.

Legal certainty as a precondition for capital

Investors weighing African opportunities rarely evaluate returns in isolation; they weigh whether the legal environment protecting those returns is legible and navigable. Licensing sequencing, sector approvals, local content rules, and the interplay between national and regional law are often invisible from outside a given market which is where early legal counsel, rather than reactive counsel, does its most valuable work.

The conference

This framed the discussions at *Réussir l'investissement en Afrique*, held 7–8 September 2026 in Paris, organised by the African Business Law Firms Association (ABLFA) with the African Legal Support Facility (ALSF) and African Development Bank. Day one covered investment partnerships and sector financing; day two turned to country-specific legal workshops, including one dedicated to Cameroon. The ALSF's presence is notable in itself: its mandate is precisely to close the gap in legal capacity between African states and international counterparties, underscoring that how legal expertise is shared between local and international actors is treated as an institutional priority.

Cameroon through a local lens

Cameroon's session reflected growing investor interest in country-specific, rather than generic "African," legal risk. A central instrument here is Law No. 2013/004 of 18 April 2013 on private investment incentives, which implements Cameroon's Investment Charter and offers tax, customs and financial incentives to investors meeting thresholds tied to job creation, exports, local input use or value added, administered through a one-stop-shop approval process. Structuring an investment to qualify and navigating that approval process requires the kind of granular, administrative familiarity that comes from sustained local practice, not desk research.

Cameroon is also an OHADA member state, meaning company law, secured transactions and arbitration are governed by Uniform Acts applied uniformly across seventeen countries. That harmonisation reduces one layer of cross-border risk, but Uniform Acts are still interpreted through each state's own judicial and administrative practice a framework that is uniform on paper is not automatically uniform in application.

Why local–international collaboration matters

This is the gap a parallel initiative sought to address. Serges Martin Zangue, Managing Partner of Zangue & Partners which represented Cameroon at the conference alongside Senior Associate Joel Noussie convened a separate meeting on 10 September with an international law firm to discuss practical modalities of collaboration: clear division of roles on shared mandates, coordinated rather than duplicated work, and reciprocal referral development.

The model under discussion treats neither firm as subordinate. International firms bring cross-border experience and client relationships; local firms bring regulatory literacy and the market judgment that determines whether a transaction structured abroad can actually be executed on the ground. Investment outcomes depend on both and a defined collaboration model turns that complementarity into something reliable rather than improvised deal by deal.

Practical considerations for investors

Recurring legal themes for investors entering markets like Cameroon include: regulatory compliance and licensing; corporate structuring; investment protection; exchange control within CEMAC; taxation and incentive eligibility; employment and local content rules; dispute resolution strategy, including OHADA arbitration; financing structures; local partnerships; and calibrated due diligence. These points are illustrative, not a definitive statement of Cameroonian law, which should be verified against current statutory text before reliance.

Conclusion

The conference's Cameroon session and the collaboration initiative convened alongside it point to the same shift: legal risk in African investment is increasingly assessed jurisdiction by jurisdiction, with local expertise treated as indispensable rather than supplementary. For investors, that means bringing legal strategy in at the outset. For law firms, it means the ones best placed to serve cross-border clients will be those that have already built the working relationships needed to function as genuine co-counsel.