SME Islamic Financing in Cameroon: Evaluations and Suggestions for Improvement

In Cameroon, SMEs represent over 95% of total enterprises in the country. They are important to the Cameroonian economy. Although they represent a substantial amount of total enterprises, they still encounter challenges relating to financing their businesses. Islamic SME financing has not been popular in the country especially that Islamic finance in Cameroon is still in its infancy stage. There are three microfinance institutions offering Islamic financial products, amongst which one is a Muslim cooperative. However, they have been facing challenges. It is in light of these, that this thesis will attempt to evaluate these microfinance institutions in order to have a clearer picture of the challenges they face and attempt to provide suggestions to address those challenges. For that purpose, a semi-structured interview with the managers of the microfinance institutions has been conducted in order to evaluate them and propose suggestions that could help improve the operations and the functioning of the microfinance institutions. The findings revealed that the challenges that these institutions encounter are related to lack of knowledge of Islamic finance on part of both the staffs and the beneficiaries, lack of awareness of the availability of Islamic financial products, lack of sufficient budget to finance the high demand of financing, lack of personal finance provision, and low recovery rate. Thus, the proposed suggestions will address and remedy the above mentioned challenges that the Cameroonian Microfinance institutions encounter. This research will act as gauge to measure the performance of the current MFIs so as to enable it achieve its full potential in terms of addressing the needs of Muslim small entrepreneurs and improving their products and services.