Paris will host the first edition of the Ensemble Back Home forum on September 18-19, 2026, an event designed to turn Cameroonian diaspora savings into concrete investment back home.
The financial stakes are significant: Cameroonians abroad send home roughly 650 billion CFA francs a year. In 2024, those transfers reached 652 billion CFA francs, 35% of it from France alone.
More than 400 participants are expected, organized around four themes: diaspora bonds, entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence and financing for structural projects.
The initiative fits into a broader government strategy: Yaoundé has set its sights on raising up to 2 trillion CFA francs from its diaspora. On August 3, 2026, Finance Minister Louis Paul Motaze met with the IOM's head of mission to discuss the link between migration policy, diaspora capital and local job creation.
The bet remains ambitious: turning savings currently absorbed mostly by everyday household spending back home into long-term project financing means convincing a diaspora sometimes burned by a lack of guarantees on this kind of investment.
The success of this first forum will be measured less by the quality of the discussions in Paris than by its ability to produce concrete financial instruments — bonds, dedicated funds — that the diaspora can actually put money into, beyond statements of intent.
