Of the 252,830 new voters registered in Cameroon between January and August 2026, only 234 live abroad. The figure, released on September 1 by Elections Cameroon (Elecam) director general Erik Essoussè, immediately reignited debate over the diaspora's place in national electoral life.
The annual revision of the electoral rolls closed on August 31, bringing the national register to 8,238,778 voters, a total still provisional pending clean-up operations to remove duplicates, deceased voters and irregular entries. Set against the full campaign, the share reserved for Cameroonians living abroad remains negligible: barely one in a thousand new registrants resides outside the country.
Elecam had nonetheless stated, on its official website, its ambition to step up registration at Cameroonian diplomatic missions during this campaign. After eight months of collection, the final tally, barely above two hundred files across every host country combined, raises questions about how far that consular effort actually reached a diaspora scattered across several continents.
The gap stands in sharp contrast with the institutional attention otherwise paid to this diaspora. The "Ensemble Back Home" forum, set for September 18 and 19 in Paris, is expected to bring together more than 400 participants around the annual transfers of Cameroonians abroad, estimated at 650 billion CFA francs, to steer them toward productive investment. The state is thus courting its diaspora's savings while struggling to convince it to register to vote.
The calendar still leaves limited room to catch up. Provisional rolls are due to be published by October 20 at the latest, ahead of a final national list set for December 30, 2026, once the register clean-up is complete. Those deadlines precede the municipal and legislative elections expected in early 2027.
No new measure has so far been announced to expand registration points abroad before the electoral register's final closure. The Cameroonian diaspora's electoral weight will therefore keep being measured, as in 2026, by a handful of files filed at embassies — far short of the economic role Yaoundé assigns it elsewhere.
