Cameroon's Treasury Single Account: Finding Public Money Parked in Banks

By Damian Maabo, with field reporting by Clarice Arrey Tarkang and Hugues Djon.

By December 2026, Cameroon is due to be in the implementation phase of the treasury single account reform, which would pull public money out of scattered bank accounts and into a single account. The Bank of Central African States (BEAC) launched the reform for the whole community. In Cameroon, the stakes are visible in one figure: funds held in credit institutions for public projects and programmes rose from 450 billion FCFA in 2022 to more than 1,300 billion FCFA by June 2026, according to BEAC data.

What a single account is for

Public bodies, projects and programmes in Cameroon hold money in accounts spread across the banking system. The state can lose track of which entity has cash and where. The treasury single account is meant to centralise those resources so the Ministry of Finance can see all of it, in one place, at any moment.

The reform comes at a hard fiscal moment: domestic and global financial pressures are mounting, and a mastery of the debt level is at stake. Money that is sitting idle in commercial banks, while the state borrows elsewhere, is a cost the treasury cannot ignore.

The number that explains the urgency

The central statistic is a stock take of public money held in credit institutions. It stood at 450 billion FCFA in 2022 and exceeded 1,300 billion FCFA by June 2026, a rise of well over 800 billion FCFA in four years. The source is the central bank itself.

Who is affected

Three groups are directly concerned: the banking sector, monetary policy and the state. For banks, deposits of public funds are a source of liquidity, so moving them could change lending capacity. For monetary policy, centralised public cash is easier to measure and manage. For the state, the promise is transparency and performance.

This ties directly to the payroll audit described in the state payroll audit, and to the councils' funding in the story on council funding: all of them depend on knowing where public money is and whether it is used on time. The debt side of the story is in our analysis of Cameroon's debt trap.

What the law already says

The principle is not new in Cameroonian law. As EcoMatin has reported, Article 79 of Law No. 2018/012 of 11 July 2018 on the financial regime of the State says public resources must be managed by public accountants and kept in a single account opened in the name of the Treasury at BEAC, and that no public administration may open an account in a commercial bank without express authorisation.

Compliance is another matter. In February 2026, EcoMatin reported figures from the National Economic and Financial Committee showing that public entities held more than 700 billion FCFA in commercial banks at 30 September 2025, while the Treasury faced acute cash pressures and kept raising money on the market. That figure and BEAC's 1,300 billion FCFA come from different dates and may not cover the same entities, so they should not be read as a single trend. Both point in the same direction.

The IMF has its own reason to watch. In March 2026, its directors called for vigilance over the sovereign-bank nexus, the way the banks and the state depend on each other. Moving public deposits out of commercial banks would touch that link directly.

What to watch next

The December 2026 milestone is the main checkpoint. Watch for the transfer schedule for each public entity, how banks respond to losing public deposits, and whether the ministry publishes the consolidated cash position once the account is live.

Sources and further reading: Bank of Central African States (BEAC), Ministry of Finance (MINFI), EcoMatin, 24 February 2026, IMF: 2026 Article IV consultation with Cameroon. Field reporting: Clarice Arrey Tarkang and Hugues Djon. Figures are from BEAC; legal and fiscal context comes from EcoMatin and the IMF. Updated 7 November 2026.

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