Public E-Procurement Service : Execution Strategies Under Scrutiny

Cameroon is pushing ahead with reforms to make its public procurement as well as the award of public contracts more transparent and efficient and most importantly all-digital. The road to this has not been without bumps. These came to the fore on April 16, 2025, as the Minister Delegate at the Presidency in charge of Public Contracts, Ibrahim Talba Malla, received the Procurement Manager for West Africa at the World Bank, Nazaneen Ismail Ali, in Yaounde. The exchanges focused on evaluating progress and unlocking solutions to speed up the delivery of public contracts supported by the World Bank under the Program-for-Results (PforR) framework with all actors involved with public contracts present.
COLEPS, short form for Cameroon Online E-Procurement System, is an online platform designed to digitalize the procurement process. It allows companies to bid for government contracts electronically, a move expected to cut down delays, reduce corruption, and improve monitoring. “Public procurement accounts for 6.9 per cent of Cameroon’s GDP and this is a PforR project, which comes with strict deadlines and quality benchmarks. We can only disburse funds when the expected results are met,” the procurement manager said. 
Among the major setbacks discussed was the lack of a technical consultant to guide the use of COLEPS. Despite these operationalization challenges, Ibrahim Talba Malla rea...