Cameroon Legal Assistant: Free Legal Information on Land, Mining, Company, Investment and Labour Law

The Cameroon Legal Assistant is a free tool that explains what Cameroonian law says about the questions people and businesses actually face: how to check a land title before buying, what a mining licence requires, how much it costs to register a company, whether profits can leave the country, and what an employer owes its staff. It combines five plain-language legal guides, written and sourced by our newsroom, with an AI assistant that answers follow-up questions in real time.

What the Cameroon Legal Assistant does

Cameroon's business law sits in several layers at once. Land is governed by national ordinances dating from 1974. Companies are formed under the OHADA Uniform Acts shared by seventeen African states. Foreign exchange follows rules set for the six countries of the CEMAC monetary union. Mining has had a new code since December 2023, and labour relations still rest on the 1992 Labour Code. Finding the right text, and understanding how it is applied in practice, is hard for citizens and even harder for investors reading from abroad.

The assistant does three things. It explains which law applies and which institution is responsible. It describes the usual procedure, documents, costs and risks. And it tells you when a question has become a specific case that needs a lawyer, a notary or an official decision. It does not draft contracts, assess your chances in a dispute, or replace professional advice.

Who it is for

Cameroonian citizens who want to understand their rights before signing a land sale, starting a business, taking a job or dealing with an administration. International businesses and investors researching entry into Cameroon: the documents a company needs, the licences a mining project requires, the incentives available under the investment law and the rules on moving money in and out of the CEMAC zone. Journalists, students and researchers who need a starting point and the name of the relevant statute.

How it works, and how your question is handled

When you type a question, it is sent to our own secure server, which forwards it to a large language model (Google Gemini) with instructions to give general legal information about Cameroon only. No access key is stored in your browser. To keep the service free and fair, each visitor can ask a limited number of questions per minute and per day. We do not ask for your name, and we do not store the questions you type; your connection address is only used, in scrambled form, to apply the daily limit. Do not include personal or confidential details in a question.

AI answers can be wrong. Treat every answer as a starting point and check it against the guides below, the official texts and a qualified professional.

Five legal guides

Each guide explains one area of law in depth, lists the key costs, requirements and risks, and answers five common questions. The assistant on each guide is set to that topic.

• Land title verification in Cameroon: land certificates, the 1974 ordinances, how to check a title and what foreign buyers can own.
• Mining licence application in Cameroon: the 2023 Mining Code, artisanal and industrial permits, State participation and gold marketing.
• Company registration cost in Cameroon: SARL, SAS and SA under OHADA, the CFCE one-stop shop, fees and tax obligations.
• Foreign investment law in Cameroon: incentives, foreign ownership rules and profit repatriation under CEMAC exchange control.
• Cameroon labour law for employers: contracts, minimum wage, social security, dismissal and work permits for foreign staff.

Why a documentary site built a legal tool

Our films on Cameroon's ports and trade and on land encroachment at Douala International Airport kept returning to the same problem: people lose money and time because the rules are hard to find. The Cameroon Legal Assistant is our attempt to make those rules easier to reach, in the languages our readers use.

English · Français · Deutsch · Türkçe · Русский · 中文 · العربية