A steelworks creates hundreds of skilled, durable jobs and a supply chain several times larger

1.1 An EAF works is a chain of process areas, each with its own trades

A long-products EAF works turns a cold metallic charge into finished bars and coils in six steps, and every step has its own crew. In the raw-materials yard, scrap and direct-reduced iron (DRI, iron ore from which the oxygen has been removed with gas) are unloaded, sorted, weighed and loaded into charging baskets by overhead cranes. In the melt shop, an electric arc between graphite electrodes and the charge melts it; the melter and furnace operators control power input, oxygen and carbon injection, slag and temperature, and take samples for chemical analysis. The liquid steel is tapped into a ladle and moved to the ladle furnace, where its chemistry and temperature are adjusted by alloy additions. At the continuous caster it solidifies in water-cooled copper moulds into square billets. The billets are reheated and passed through a rolling mill, a line of stands that reduce them step by step to reinforcing bar or wire rod. Finally the product is cooled, cut, bundled, tagged and dispatched.

Around this chain run five support functions that employ as many skilled people as production itself: mechanical maintenance; electrical, automation and instrumentation; quality and metallurgy; health, safety and environment (HSE); and logistics and administration. Figure 1.1 shows the map. The furnace-orange boxes, the melt shop, the ladle furnace and the caster, are where Cameroon has the thinnest pool of experienced workers, a point developed in Chapter 4.

Source: Cameroon Steel analysis of a generic EAF, ladle-furnace, billet-caster and bar-and-rod-mill configuration; process description consistent with IFC, EHS Guidelines for Integrated Steel Mills, 2007 [S55].

The map matters for policy because it shows that a steelworks recruits across the whole spectrum of technical education. A crane operator or a bundling-line operator can be trained from a technical baccalaureate or a vocational certificate in months. An electrical and automation technician needs a two- to three-year higher technical diploma before plant training starts. A process metallurgist or a melt-shop engineer needs an engineering degree and several years of plant experience. A national skills strategy for steel therefore has to work at three levels at once: secondary technical schools and vocational centres, university institutes of technology (IUTs) and engineering schools.

1.2 The occupational map: eleven families, one plant

Table 1.1 groups the roles into eleven occupational families, with the entry route that would typically apply in Cameroon. The share of each family in the workforce varies with automation and outsourcing, but the planned first-phase mix published by Cameroon Steel gives an order of magnitude: about 300 operators, 100 technicians, 50 engineers and 50 administrative and support staff, out of about 500 direct jobs [S11].

Table 1.1 Occupational families of an EAF long-products works, typical roles and entry routes in Cameroon

Source: Cameroon Steel analysis. Diploma names follow Cameroonian usage: CAP (certificat d’aptitude professionnelle), CQP (certificat de qualification professionnelle), DUT (diplôme universitaire de technologie, awarded by IUTs), BTS (brevet de technicien supérieur). Planned first-phase mix from Cameroon Steel’s public planning figures [S11].

Two features of the table deserve emphasis. First, about a quarter of the posts sit in maintenance, automation, quality and HSE, functions whose skills transfer readily to other heavy industries: cement, aluminium, power, ports and mining. Training for steel is therefore training for the Kribi industrial cluster as a whole, which the Kribi Port Industrial Zone (KPIZ) plans to grow around metallurgy, wood, agro-industry and construction materials [S38][S39]. Second, the process roles in the melt shop and caster have few equivalents in Cameroon’s existing industry. The country’s steel firms are mainly re-rollers that convert imported billets and local scrap, with a handful of small melt shops in Douala [S08], so the pool of experienced melters and casters is small and already employed; most will have to be formed.

1.3 Direct jobs per million tonnes vary tenfold

The number of people a steelworks employs per tonne depends less on the furnace than on everything around it. Figure 1.2 compares published cases. At one end, the new generation of US "micro mills" making rebar from scrap employs about 200 to 230 people for about 0.39 to 0.45 Mt of capacity: Nucor’s Lexington mill in North Carolina (430,000 tons, about 200 permanent jobs) and CMC’s mill in Berkeley County, West Virginia (500,000 tons, 230 jobs) [S03][S04]. The announcements say "tons": CMC’s annual report defines its ton as the US short ton [S82], and the Nucor figure is read in the same way, so 500,000 tons is about 0.45 Mt and 430,000 tons about 0.39 Mt. These plants are highly automated, run a single product family and buy in many services. At the other end, Devki’s ore-based steel plant at Kwale in Kenya announced 2,500 direct jobs for 500,000 t a year [S05], and Prometal’s two new plants in Douala were reported to create 1,000 direct jobs for about 360,000 t a year of rolling capacity [S07]. In Algeria, Tosyali’s 2.5 Mtpa flat-products complex was reported to employ about 2,200 workers when it was commissioned in 2024 [S06], fewer than 1,000 per million tonnes, which shows how large single lines lower the ratio. The European Union’s steel industry as a whole, which includes blast furnaces, flat-product lines and research centres, employed 298,000 people directly in 2024 for an average output of about 146 Mt of steel a year, about 2,040 per million tonnes [S02].

Source: Nucor, 7 April 2022 [S03]; West Virginia Public Broadcasting, 8 December 2022 [S04]; EUROFER, European Steel in Figures 2025 [S02]; Journal du Cameroun, 19 January 2024 [S07]; Capital FM Kenya, 20 November 2022 [S05]; Cameroon Steel public planning figures [S11]. Ratios are Cameroon Steel arithmetic; Nucor and CMC capacities converted at 0.907 t per short ton.

Cameroon Steel’s planning values sit in the middle of this range: about 1,670 direct jobs per million tonnes for a first phase of 0.3 Mtpa nameplate capacity (1,670 to 1,850 per million tonnes of its expected sustained output of 270,000 to 300,000 t a year), falling to about 1,100 (900 to 1,300) per million tonnes at the full 1 Mtpa, because shared functions such as the laboratory, the power substation, administration and the medical service do not grow in proportion to tonnage [S11]. Three choices will move the final number within that range:

• Make or buy for maintenance and services. A works that employs its own maintenance crews, laboratory and logistics will have more direct jobs and fewer contractor jobs; one that outsources them shifts employment to local suppliers, which is the subject of Chapter 6.
• Degree of automation. Modern melt shops and rolling mills run with automated furnace programmes, robotic sampling and tagging, and camera-based inspection. These reduce manual posts but raise the share of technicians and engineers.
• Product scope. Each new product line (sections, beams, merchant bar) adds a mill crew; a future direct-reduction module for Cameroonian ore would add a further process area with its own operators and maintainers.

The direction of travel is clear from the benchmarks: fewer people per tonne, each with more training. The most automated plants in Figure 1.2 employ the fewest people, but a larger share of them are technicians who maintain drives, sensors and control software. For Cameroon, this means that the quality of the training pipeline matters more than its volume.

1.4 Construction jobs are many but temporary; operating jobs are fewer but durable

A steelworks creates two very different labour demands. The construction phase brings a peak of civil, structural, mechanical and electrical trades lasting, on Cameroon Steel’s planning assumption, 18 to 30 months per phase; the operating phase brings a smaller permanent workforce for the life of the plant, typically several decades. Nucor’s Lexington micro mill illustrates the ratio: about 500 construction jobs for about 200 permanent posts [S03]. For the first phase at Mboro, Cameroon Steel uses a planning assumption of a construction peak of about 800 workers (600 to 1,000), against about 500 permanent direct jobs [S11]. Table 1.2 compares the two.

Table 1.2 Construction and operations compared, first phase of a phased EAF works (planning values)

Source: Cameroon Steel public planning figures (construction peak assumed; operations planned) [S11]; Nucor, 7 April 2022 [S03]; hazards from IFC, EHS Guidelines for Integrated Steel Mills, 2007 [S55].

The construction phase is the first and best chance to build portable skills. Each phase of a steelworks needs hundreds of welders, electricians, scaffolders and riggers. If the contracts require those trades to be tested and certified on site, a share of them leave the project with recognised qualifications that the Kribi cluster’s later builders will use. If they are not, the peak passes and leaves little behind. Chapter 9 sets out how the phasing of a works can be used to roll trained construction workers into later phases and into operations.

1.5 Each direct job supports several more along the supply chain

Steel’s employment effect extends well beyond the plant fence. The World Steel Association and Oxford Economics estimated that the industry employed 6.1 million people directly worldwide in 2017 and that "for every 2 jobs in the steel sector, 13 more jobs are supported" across its supply chain [S01]. For the European Union, EUROFER estimates a Type I employment multiplier of 6.2 and a Type II multiplier, which also counts jobs supported by employees’ spending, of 8.6 [S02]. In Kenya, Devki’s ore-based plant announced 9,000 indirect jobs alongside its 2,500 direct ones, a ratio of 3.6 to 1 [S05].

These multipliers are upper bounds for Cameroon, because they reflect economies where steel plants buy most of their goods and services from domestic suppliers. Cameroon’s industrial supply chains are thinner, and many inputs to a steelworks (graphite electrodes, refractories, ferro-alloys, spare parts) are imported. Cameroon Steel’s planning figure for indirect employment in the first phase is accordingly conservative: about 1,000 indirect jobs (800 to 1,500), or roughly two per direct job [S11]. Whether the real ratio is closer to two or to six depends on deliberate supplier development, which Chapter 6 treats as a skills question as much as a procurement one.

1.6 Steel jobs are formal, salaried and technical, which is rare in Cameroon

The quality of steel jobs matters as much as their number. In Cameroon in 2021, 86.6% of employment was in the informal sector and only 5.1% of workers held a job in the formal private sector [S12]. Workers in the formal private sector earned on average 118,200 FCFA a month in their main job, against 77,100 FCFA in the non-agricultural informal sector and 48,200 FCFA in informal agriculture; 71.7% of their dependent workers had a written fixed-term or open-ended contract, against 19.8% in the non-agricultural informal sector [S12]. Only 11.0% of all employed persons were covered by an insurance scheme in their main job [S12].

A steelworks offers the opposite profile: written contracts, payslips, social-security registration, structured training and a career ladder from operator to manager. It also trains people in skills, such as high-voltage electrical work, hydraulics, precision welding, programmable logic controllers and laboratory testing, that command a premium across industry. That is why the employment case for steel in Cameroon rests less on the raw number of jobs, which is modest against a labour force of 11.5 million [S14], than on the kind of jobs and on the skills they leave in the economy.

The policy implication follows directly. Because the jobs are technical, they will go to Cameroonians only if Cameroonians have been trained for them before the plant opens. A works that starts without a local pipeline has to rely on expatriate staff for its first years, and every expatriate post is a training opportunity deferred. The chapters that follow examine whether Cameroon’s labour market and education system can supply that pipeline, and what it would take.