Method, assumptions and derived figures

A.1 Sources and status labels

Sources were read in their original language and form wherever possible: national statistical reports (INS) and legal texts were read in full or in the relevant articles; international statistics were taken from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators application programming interface (API), which republishes ILO modelled estimates, UNESCO education statistics and World Bank Enterprise Survey indicators, on the version updated on 8 October 2026; company and institutional facts were taken from their own websites and reports. No encyclopaedia entry is cited: institutional facts come from the institutions’ own pages or from reputable secondary sources, ILO conventions and their ratification by Cameroon from the ILO’s NORMLEX database, and city locations from OpenStreetMap.

Each figure and table carries one of four status labels:

• Sourced: the value was read in the cited source.
• Derived: Cameroon Steel arithmetic on sourced inputs, as set out below.
• Assumed: a planning assumption or a Cameroon Steel assessment, with its range or scoring rules stated.
• Illustrative: a scenario, an allocation or an objective, not a forecast or a commitment.

Cameroon Steel’s project figures come from its reference configuration RC-1 (planning estimate), edition 10 October 2026 (RC-1.1) [S11]. RC-1 is not published as a separate document; the figures this paper uses are set out in this annex and in Annex D. They are labelled planned (first-phase jobs and mix, indirect jobs), indicative (full-works direct jobs, phase capacities), assumed (construction peak) or objective (localisation).

A.2 Derived figures

Young people reaching working age. The World Bank’s population estimates for 2025 give 1,830,617 boys and 1,809,995 girls aged 10 to 14, a total of 3,640,612 [S14]. Dividing by five gives about 728,000 people reaching the age of 15 in each of the next five years. Scaled to the provisional 2026 census field count of 22.7 million [S19], against the World Bank’s 2025 estimate of 29.9 million [S14], the cohort becomes 728,122 × 22.7 / 29.9 ≈ 553,000, about 550,000 in the text; the scaling assumes that the census changes the level of the population but not its age structure. The population aged 15 to 24 is the sum of the four five-year cohorts aged 15 to 19 and 20 to 24 by sex: 1,619,293 + 1,612,191 + 1,359,638 + 1,359,719 = 5,950,841 [S14].

Direct jobs per million tonnes. Direct jobs divided by capacity in million tonnes, or, for the European Union, by average annual output: Nucor Lexington, 200 jobs for 430,000 tons, read as US short tons and converted at 0.907 t per short ton to 0.390 Mt, giving 513 [S03]; CMC Berkeley County, 230 jobs for 500,000 tons (US short tons, the unit that the company’s annual report defines [S82]), converted in the same way to 0.454 Mt, giving 507 [S04]; EU steel industry, 298,000 jobs in 2024 for an average output of 146 Mt a year, 2,041 [S02]; Prometal plants 4 and 5, 1,000 for about 0.36 Mt, 2,778 [S07]; Devki, 2,500 for 0.5 Mt, 5,000 [S05]; Cameroon Steel, 500 for 0.3 Mt (Phase 1, planned), 1,667, and 1,100 (900 to 1,300) for 1.0 Mt (full works, indicative) [S11]. Capacity and job definitions differ between sources; the ratios indicate orders of magnitude.

Distances. Great-circle distances from Kribi town centre to the centres of the other cities, using the place locations published by OpenStreetMap [S75] rounded to about 0.01 degree, then rounded to the nearest kilometre; the precision is about ±2 km. Locations are city-level only; no site boundaries are used.

Localisation totals. The total direct-workforce objectives in Figure 9.3 are weighted by the planned Phase 1 mix (operators 300, technicians 100, engineers 50, administration 50): first year 0.6 × 85 + 0.2 × 70 + 0.1 × 50 + 0.1 × 70 = 77%; fifth year 0.6 × 95 + 0.2 × 90 + 0.1 × 70 + 0.1 × 90 = 91%, within the planning range of 85 to 95% around the 90% objective [S11].

Other ratios. The fall in worldsteel’s lost-time injury frequency rate from 0.85 (2022) to 0.72 (2024) is 15.3% [S51]. The ratio of men’s to women’s work-related mortality in the ILO estimates, 51.4 to 17.2 per 100,000, is 3.0 [S54].

A.3 Assessment of skills gaps (Figure 4.1)

Each occupational family was scored on four dimensions, from 1 (small gap) to 4 (critical gap), by Cameroon Steel’s project team:

• Experienced supply in Cameroon: 1 if experienced workers are widely available in Cameroonian industry; 2 if available but in demand; 3 if a small pool exists, mostly employed; 4 if almost no experienced workers exist in the country.
• Training capacity in Cameroon: 1 if programmes exist with industrial practice; 2 if programmes exist but need upgrading; 3 if only related programmes exist; 4 if no relevant programme exists.
• Recognised certification: 1 if national or international certificates are routinely used; 2 if certificates exist but are not widely held; 3 if certificates exist abroad but are not applied in Cameroon; 4 if no certification exists for the role.
• Time to competence: 1 for less than a year; 2 for one to two years; 3 for two to four years; 4 for more than four years from the start of initial training, or for roles that require extensive experience.

The scores draw on the evidence in Chapters 2 to 5 and should be read as priorities for action, not as measurements. They will be revisited with training partners.

A.4 Planning assumptions

Table A.1 Main planning assumptions and their ranges

Source: as listed.

A.5 Times to competence (Figure 5.2)

Each bar has three segments: initial qualification (months of schooling or training before recruitment: 3 months for crane and production operators, 6 for welders, melters and casters recruited with a technical diploma, 24 for technicians from an IUT, 60 for engineers and for supervisors who start as engineers or progress from operator roles), the minimum time of in-plant training to independent work, and the typical maximum. The values reflect the durations of Cameroonian diplomas (CQP, DUT and BTS of two to three years, engineering degree of five years) and typical in-plant training in EAF long-products works. For shift managers, the in-plant segment represents years of progressive experience rather than formal training.

A.6 Local-sourcing objectives (Figure 6.1)

For each procurement category, Cameroon Steel estimated the share of spend that could be placed with Cameroonian-registered suppliers in the first year of operation, given the current supplier base, and in the fifth year, assuming a supplier-development programme of the kind described in Chapter 6. The objectives assume that metallic charge, energy, graphite electrodes and ferro-alloys remain largely imported in the medium term, and that services, site works and maintenance can be largely local. They are objectives for planning and dialogue, not commitments.

A.7 Charts and data files

All charts were drawn with the house chart style of Cameroon Steel’s document engine. The data behind each chart, map and diagram is published as a JSON file with the web edition of this paper, with its source identifiers and status, and the plotted values are printed in Annex D. The map in Figure 3.1 uses Natural Earth administrative boundaries, which are in the public domain, and shows city-level locations only.