Littoral Region
Shipping delays at the Port of Douala cascade through three national economies. Cameroon's Littoral Region routes the majority of the country's maritime trade through this single facility, and the Douala-N'Djamena corridor — stretching 2,100 kilometres — serves as the primary trade artery for landlocked Chad and the Central African Republic. That concentration makes Douala a keystone species in the regional economy: remove it and the trade metabolism of three countries restructures around the absence.
The dominance is an accident of geography hardened by decades of investment. Douala sits in the Wouri estuary, which provided sheltered anchorage for colonial-era vessels but now constrains modern shipping — shallow waters limit vessel draft, and congestion regularly ranks among the worst in West Africa. The industrial zones of Bonabéri and Bassa, built to exploit port proximity, maxed out capacity years ago. Manufacturers cluster where the port is, not where space exists, because labour pools, supplier networks, and logistics infrastructure lock them into the same chokepoint they suffer from. Path-dependence at geographic scale.
Kribi deep-water port, Central Africa's first deep-sea facility, became operational in 2018 with Chinese financing. It offers faster vessel turnaround thanks to deeper waters and less congestion. Yet Douala's revenues have not fallen — trade volumes are growing in both ports simultaneously, suggesting the system was capacity-starved rather than zero-sum. Beyond Douala, the Littoral Region produces cocoa, coffee, and palm oil in the Mungo division, and the Sanaga river system provides hydroelectric power that feeds the national grid. But the ecological cost of the port city's growth is mounting. Since the 1980s, rural migration has driven Douala's core density above 12,000 people per square kilometre, pushing settlement into mangrove and floodplain. The Wouri estuary lost over 5,700 hectares of mangrove between 1986 and 2014, and flooding has forced communities progressively inland. The port built the city; the city is now consuming the estuary that sustains it — niche construction in reverse.