West Region
Eighty-one percent of market traders surveyed in Cameroon's West Region belong to a njangi — a rotating savings group where members pool money weekly and take turns receiving the pot. This is not a curiosity of informal finance. It is a parallel banking system, invented by the Bamiléké people, that enables business formation without formal credit. The Bamiléké comprise roughly a quarter of Cameroon's population but have built the country's most extensive informal commercial networks, and the njangi is how they capitalised them.
The system works because the West Region's social architecture enforces cooperation at scale. The fon — the traditional chief in each Bamiléké fondom — does not own land but allocates it on behalf of the community, a role recognised as first-degree legal jurisdiction over land disputes under Cameroonian law. This property-rights function, combined with the reciprocal obligations embedded in njangi membership, creates an interlocking network of economic coordination that operates without central authority. Each tontine group functions as a node in a distributed network, cycling capital through peer connections rather than hierarchical channels. The enforcement mechanism is social: default on a njangi and the network excludes you — not just from credit, but from the commercial relationships that credit enables.
The West Region's agricultural economy reinforces the pattern. The highlands around Bafoussam — the regional capital, which has grown from 62,000 people in 1976 to over 350,000 — produce a major share of Cameroon's arabica coffee and, together with the neighbouring Northwest, 80% of the country's potatoes. But coffee has been collapsing nationally: Cameroon exported 156,000 tons in 1990 and fewer than 33,000 tons by 2014. The West Region's farmers remain locked into coffee infrastructure — processing stations, buying networks, transport routes — even as returns shrink. Path-dependence at commodity scale.
What makes the West Region structurally distinctive is that its parallel economy reduces dependence on the state. Tontines replace banks. The fon system replaces courts. Diaspora remittances — exceeding $600 million nationally per year — flow disproportionately toward the western highlands, replacing government transfers. This economic self-sufficiency maps directly to political behaviour: the West Region is Cameroon's most consistent opposition stronghold, because a population that funds itself through peer networks rather than state patronage has less to lose from voting against the regime. The mechanism is source-sink dynamics in reverse — instead of the centre sustaining the periphery, the periphery sustains itself and exports surplus labour and capital to the centre.