Executive summary

ES.1 Ten findings

1. A steelworks creates few jobs per tonne, but good ones. Direct employment ranges from about 500 to 5,000 jobs per million tonnes across published cases; Cameroon Steel’s planning values, about 1,670 per million tonnes in the first phase and about 1,100 at full capacity, sit in the middle of that range. Almost all are formal, salaried and technical, in a country where only 5.1% of workers hold a formal private-sector job [S02][S03][S05][S11][S12].
2. The jobs span eleven occupational families and every level of technical education. About 60% of the planned first-phase workforce are operators, 20% technicians, 10% engineers and 10% administrative and support staff; about a quarter of all posts are in maintenance, automation, quality and safety functions whose skills transfer to the rest of the Kribi industrial cluster [S11].
3. Cameroon’s constraint is experience, not people. About 730,000 young people reach working age every year on World Bank estimates, or about 550,000 if the provisional 2026 census count of 22.7 million is confirmed, while about 197,000 new jobs were recorded in 2025. Unemployment rises with education, to 17.6% among graduates and 28.2% among women graduates [S14][S19][S17][S12]. Chapter 2 sets out the three explanations usually advanced: graduates queue for scarce formal, salaried jobs; much higher education is general rather than technical; and links between schools and employers are weak. An employer can act on all three by offering formal technical jobs in which schooling becomes competence.
4. The schools exist; steelmaking content, workshops and industry links do not. ENSPY (École nationale supérieure polytechnique de Yaoundé), the University of Douala’s engineering school and institute of technology, the University of Ngaoundéré’s institute and mining schools, the new University of Ebolowa and three vocational centres of excellence cover mechanical, electrical, chemical and maintenance disciplines, most within 260 km of Kribi. No programme dedicated to steelmaking has been identified, and 2,694 vocational trainers lack a professional diploma [S18][S21][S22][S23][S24][S28].
5. The critical gaps are in the melt shop, the caster and supervision. Furnace and casting operation and the supervision of a 24-hour process have almost no local base and take two to ten years to form; maintenance, welding and electrical skills exist but need industrial upgrading and, above all, certification.
6. Certification is the cheapest lever. International standards exist for welders (ISO 9606-1) and safety management (ISO 45001), and Law No. 2018/010 provides for apprenticeship, work-linked training and validation of experience. What is missing is a set of steel-occupation competence standards written by employers with the ministry, and a centre to test against them [S59][S58][S26].
7. Training models that work combine school, plant and supplier, and start early. Germany’s dual system, the corporate academies of OCP, Dangote and Tata Steel, vendor training written into equipment contracts and process simulators all point the same way: employers lead, schools certify, suppliers transfer know-how, and the pipeline opens years before production [S48][S42][S47][S43][S50].
8. Cameroon’s law now ties incentives to local skills and suppliers, but preference is not capability. The 2025 investment-incentives ordinance requires a local-skills, local-hiring and local-subcontracting programme and allows commitments to be verified. Local suppliers will qualify only through structured development. Dangote Cement’s local procurement share rose from 72% to 82% between 2023 and 2025, a period in which it reports investing in supplier development; the effect of exchange-rate changes on the shares is not separated [S36][S42].
9. Women are the largest untapped pool of technical talent. Women are 43.9% of Cameroon’s labour force but about 11% of steel workforces worldwide. Reaching them requires a lawful route past the 1992 Labour Code’s ban on women’s night work in industry, which mirrors ILO Convention No. 89, still in force for Cameroon; a pipeline through schools and scholarships; and facilities and conduct rules designed for a mixed workforce [S14][S51][S33][S69][S73].
10. Safety must be the first skill taught. In 2021, 15.4% of workers in the South Region reported a work accident in the previous year and only 6.6% were insured; the best steel companies run below one lost-time injury per million hours. Closing that gap requires certified safety-critical authorisations, a common safety passport for the zone and supervisors who lead in the field [S12][S51].

ES.2 The opportunity: durable, technical jobs and a cluster around them

Cameroon Steel is developing a steel complex at Mboro, in the Kribi industrial-port zone, with a design capacity of 1 Mtpa built in phases; its foundation stone was laid on 30 December 2024 by the Prime Minister, representing the Head of State [S09][S10]. The first phase, of 0.3 Mtpa nameplate capacity (expected sustained output 270,000 to 300,000 t a year), centres on an EAF melt shop that makes billets, with output flexible between rolled products (wire rod and reinforcing bar) and merchant billets for Cameroon’s re-rollers, which import about 60% of their charge (161,000 t of billets in 2023). Because rebar capacity is already well above demand, Phase 1 tonnage is aimed at replacing imports and at exports within CEMAC (White papers 04 and 09) [S11][S08][S76]. On the RC-1.1 schedule, financing is planned for 2028, works from the first quarter of 2029, first heat in the second half of 2030 and ramp-up in 2031 [S11]. The company’s public planning figures put the first-phase operating workforce at about 500 direct jobs, with about 1,000 indirect jobs, and the full works at 900 to 1,300 direct jobs; the construction of the first phase is expected to employ 600 to 1,000 workers at its peak [S11]. Figure ES.1 summarises these values with their status.

Source: Cameroon Steel reference configuration RC-1 (planning estimate), edition 10 October 2026 (RC-1.1) [S11].

These numbers are modest against a labour force of about 11.5 million [S14]. The value of a steelworks for Cameroon’s labour market lies elsewhere: in the kind of jobs it creates, in the skills it leaves, and in the industrial cluster it anchors. A steelworks needs melters, casters and mill operators, but it also needs hydraulics and electrical technicians, automation specialists, welders, laboratory analysts, safety officers and supervisors, whose skills are portable across cement, aluminium, energy, ports and agro-industry. The Kribi Port Industrial Zone (KPIZ), created in February 2026, plans clusters in steel linked to mineral exports, wood, petrochemicals, agro-industry and construction materials and expects up to 150,000 direct and indirect jobs over 15 years [S38]. A steel skills pipeline is, in practice, a cluster skills pipeline.

ES.3 The constraint: experience, not candidates

Cameroon’s labour market has an abundance of young candidates with schooling and a scarcity of people with industrial experience. Only 5.1% of workers are employed in the formal private sector, 86.6% of jobs are informal, and of the quarter of adults who have followed vocational training, 39.3% learned on the job, mostly in small workshops [S12]. Employers train less than they did: the share of firms offering formal training fell from 37.6% in 2016 to 24.0% in 2024 [S15]. The result is a self-perpetuating gap: formal firms do not train, so newcomers cannot recruit experienced workers, so they must train from scratch.

The South Region, which hosts Kribi, has the highest labour-force participation of any survey region and an above-average share of adults with vocational training (32.2% against 25.0% nationally), but also the highest rates of work accidents and occupational disease, and among the lowest insurance cover [S12]. Its new university at Ebolowa, the polytechnic annex at Meyomessala and the vocational centre of excellence at Sangmélima give it, for the first time, a local base of technical education on which an industrial employer can build [S23][S18][S24].

ES.4 What must change

The paper’s analysis leads to five shifts in how industrial skills are built in Cameroon.

From school-led to employer-led training. Employers should define competences, provide tutors and equipment and hire graduates; schools should teach and certify. Law No. 2018/010 already provides the legal basis for apprenticeship and work-linked training [S26]; a phased steelworks is the kind of employer, large and long-lived, that can anchor it.

From diplomas to certified competence. Steel-occupation competence standards, international certificates for welders and safety-critical tasks, and vendor certificates for equipment operation should sit on top of national diplomas, so that competence is visible and portable.

From training after hiring to training before production. The pipeline must open about three years before first steel, which for a first heat in the second half of 2030 means 2027, before financial close: engineers recruited first and placed in operating plants, a dual apprenticeship for maintenance and mill trades started 30 months ahead, operators trained on simulators from 18 months ahead, and vendor training specified, measured and paid for in every equipment contract.

From preference to supplier development. Local content will multiply jobs only if Cameroonian suppliers are helped up a ladder of registration, qualification, pilot orders, coaching and approval, at the scale of the KPIZ zone, and if local content is measured honestly.

From a male workforce to a mixed one, and from compliance to a safety culture. A new works can design inclusion and safety in from the start: facilities and rosters for women, a code of conduct for all contractors, certified safety-critical authorisations and supervisors trained to lead in the field.

ES.5 An illustrative workforce plan

The workforce plan in Chapter 9 allocates the planned first-phase workforce of about 500 across process areas and functions. About half of it, the melt-shop, caster, maintenance and engineering cadres (240 posts), must be in training 18 to 36 months before first steel; the rest 6 to 18 months ahead, including about 140 posts in the yard, finishing, dispatch and support that can be recruited and trained in the final year before first steel, largely from the South Region. The 50 engineers must be recruited first because they will become trainers, supervisors and successors to expatriate specialists. On the RC-1.1 schedule, with first heat in the second half of 2030, the skills partnership and graduate recruitment start in early to mid 2027 and the first apprenticeship intake in early 2028. Both fall before financial close, planned for 2028: they would be funded at risk by Cameroon Steel and the proposed cluster fund, and sized to the RC-1.1 schedule [S11]. Cameroon Steel’s objective is that about 90% of its operating workforce, within a range of 85 to 95%, be Cameroonian by the fifth year of operation [S11], with each expatriate post paired from the start with a named Cameroonian successor. Each later phase should be staffed largely by people trained in the phase before it, through promotion, annual apprenticeship intakes and Cameroonian trainers.

ES.6 Twelve actions

Chapter 10 sets out twelve actions with leads, partners, timing and indicators. Three are enablers that can be put in place within a year:

1. A Kribi steel and heavy-industry skills partnership convened by the Ministry of Employment and Vocational Training with the education and industry ministries, KPIZ, employers, unions and training providers.
2. A cluster training fund combining part of the foreign-worker visa levy introduced in 2023, employer contributions and development-finance support, paying providers partly on results [S31][S29].
3. A fiscal incentive for apprenticeships, using the provision for tax incentives in Law No. 2018/010 and linked to certified outputs [S26].

The other nine cover curricula co-designed with ENSPY, ENSPD, the ISTD, ENSET and the University of Ebolowa; a dual apprenticeship programme; steel-occupation competence standards and a test centre; training clauses in equipment contracts; women’s access to heavy-industry careers; a common safety passport and contractor standard for the zone; zone-wide supplier development and local-content reporting; careers outreach in schools; and annual publication of workforce indicators.

ES.7 How to read this paper

Chapters 1 to 3 describe the demand (what jobs a steelworks creates) and the supply (Cameroon’s labour market and education system). Chapters 4 to 8 examine the gaps and the means to close them: skills and certification, training models, local content and supplier development, women’s participation and safety culture. Chapter 9 brings these together in an illustrative workforce plan, Chapter 10 sets out recommendations and Chapter 11 lists what is not yet known. Annex A explains methods and assumptions, Annex B defines terms, Annex C lists every source and Annex D prints the data behind every chart.

Every number in the paper carries a source marker and, in figures and tables, a status label: sourced, derived, assumed or illustrative. Workforce figures for Cameroon Steel’s project are public planning values from its reference configuration, labelled planned, indicative, assumed or objective; they are not commitments and will be refined as engineering and phasing are confirmed. Generated images are labelled "Illustrative view" and do not depict the project, its staff or any real person.

Statement of interest. This paper is published by Cameroon Steel, which is developing a steelworks at Kribi. It is written to inform public debate; its analysis is independent of any commercial offer, and every figure is sourced or labelled with its status.