CAMEROON’S INFRASTRUCTURE: A CONTINENTAL PERSPECTIVE be viewed as a natural outcome of the tight balance between available capacity and demand and the lack of broad-based institutional reform, which has perpetuated built-in inefficiencies and structural problems. Capacity expansion and wider institutional reforms offer the route to lower port and cargo-handling costs.

More generally, the charges levied in Central African ports do not compare favorably with the rest of Africa; let alone with global best practice. Compared with global best practice, Africa’s ports are generally expensive to use and subject to extensive delays. Southern African ports tend to perform somewhat better than those in other regions across a range of parameters. The services provided by Central and West African ports generally cost twice as much as those in other global ports. Unlike in Central Africa, most southern African terminals offer a given number of free days’ storage—typically up to seven days—and thereafter apply a daily storage charge, sometimes on a sliding scale that increases as the number of days increases.

Finally, the port of Douala is not yet ISPS-code compliant. In 2006 the port introduced a containerscanning device. At the beginning of 2007 new automated customs procedures went into effect. However, the authorities estimate that it will still take a number of years to exit the ISPS blacklist.

# Rails

The railways of Cameroon perform relatively well by African standards, with good productivity indicators. Cameroon implemented one of the earliest rail concessions in the region—CAMRAIL. The concession arrangement has helped to boost operational efficiency and thus traffic, so that labor and rolling stock productivity measures show substantially better performance than the region’s major publicly owned railways and compare favorably with other rail concessions in the region (table 6). CAMRAIL carries about 60 percent of nonmineral traffic from Douala to the borders with the Central African Republic and Chad, and it compares favorably with competing bus services on the route from Yaoundé to Ngaoundéré, for which travel by unpaved road becomes difficult in the rainy season.

**Table 6. Comparative performance ofCentral African railways, 2005**

||Labor<br>productivity|Carriage<br>productivity|Locomotive<br>productivity|Wagon<br>productivity|Freight yield|Passenger<br>yield|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Angola, CFM|580|4,045|30|950|||
|Cameroon, CAMRAIL|603|4,738|26|868|5|2|
|Congo, Dem. Rep., CFMK|18|64|10|257|14|4|
|Congo, Dem. Rep, SNCC|38|275|4|317|13|3|
|Congo, Rep., CFCO|221|3,212|27|300|11|6|
|Gabon, SETRAG|1,778|1,891|39|902|||
|Rail concessions|350|2,945|23|491|5|2|

_Source_ : AICD railways database. _Legend_ : Labor productivity = ‘000s traffic units per employee; Locomotive productivity = millions of traffic units per locomotive; Carriage productivity = ‘000s passenger-kilometers per carriage; Wagon productivity = ‘000s net tonne-kilometers per wagon.

Since 2007 the concessionaire’s productivity has improved. The share of working locomotives increased from 76.9 in 2007 to 83.4 percent in 2010. CAMRAIL’s debt service coverage ratio rose from 19