Platform For Mobilising Debt-Free Funds to Enhance Development Underway

Yaounde — The government of Cameroon has developed a social network for solidarity-based mobilisation of non-debt-generating resources to finance projects of general interest. DevHope.com, as the platform is known, was presented to the national and international media at a press briefing in the Ministry of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development (MINEPAT) yesterday November 19.

The network offers donors the possibility to reference projects of general interest, participate in their financing through restricted contributions, interactively monitor their achievements and collect results of their impacts on final beneficiaries. According to officials of an international online outfit, Hope Finance, which worked on the project and the National Community-Driven Participative Development Programme (PNDP) that coordinated it for MINEPAT, DevHope.com also enhances the visibility of projects. "The network offers the possibility to increase the visibility of projects from the Growth and Employment Strategy Paper, both nationally and internationally, and raises complementary and alternative funds, all being non-debt-generating, so as to release budget constraints deepened by the financial and economic crises," they said. The fact that it will bring together stakeholders from the development ecosystem (institutions, registered non-governmental organisations, enterprises as well as citizens within and without the country), they noted, would promote interest convergence and reconciliation.

The network, they said, will enable fundraising from traditional donors, citizens through crowd funding and companies within the framework of the implementation of their social responsibility in assisting the State to attain its growth objectives. In order to attain optimum results, projects for funding will be broken down into detailed lists of needs tallying with the market actual prices so that donors may directly allocate their funds knowingly to all or any part of goods and services constituting the detailed cost estimate for a given project.

The innovation will be officially launched in Yaounde next Thursday November 22, 2012.