Cameroon: Health Ministry plans to recruit 25000 workers

"The analysis of personnel expenses over the last decade has revealed that the wage bill effectively paid to public agents in the State budget is growing strongly, with an annual average of 5.6%, despite the multiple actions to clean up the State's balance file. Of the 39,720 health personnel listed by the Ministry of Public Health at the end of September 2021, there are 20,116 temporary workers, compared to 11,346 civil servants, 4,846 contract workers, and 3,412 decision-makers.

However, the requests made by the Minister of Public Health come at a time when the government is seeking to rationalize recruitment within the Cameroonian civil service, due to an increasingly unbearable wage bill.

To keep an eye on recruitment, Joseph Lé, the Minister of Public Service and Administrative Reform (Minfopra) signed 28 decrees on June 11, 2021, requesting that the recruitment of new agents in the various state bodies should be done by competitive examination for 2021.

Overall, only 1,536 positions were open in 2021, which is a significant decrease from the 3,700 positions filled in 2020, the 5,411 positions in 2019, and the 5,179 positions in 2018. In Cameroon, this ratio, which is the ratio between the volume of tax and customs revenue collected in a year and the expenditure of government personnel, peaked at 36.5% in 2019. According to the document, between 2011 and the end of June 2021, the number of Cameroonian civil servants increased from 206,212 to 346,557, up 68%.

Cameroon’s Minister of Public Health announced last week his department is planning the recruitment of 25,000 health workers over the next five years. Minister Malachie said the validation of this process will help halve the shortage of personnel in the sector, which he estimated at 55,000 at the end of September 2021. With this move, Cameroon hopes to finally meet the sustainability ratio of the wage bill set at a maximum of 35% under the criteria of multilateral surveillance enacted by the CEMAC.

This increase is essentially due to the massive recruitment carried out during this period," reads a document annexed to the 2022 State budget law. Such an operation should make it possible to regularize the status of the largest contingent of health personnel currently working in the country. Similarly, their wage bill represents 32.3% against 21% in 2010,” we learn.

The expenditure on personnel has experienced the same trend, rising from only CFA681.4 billion to more than 1 trillion over the period.