#COVID19: Cameroon Businesses Deploy Social Media For Marketing – Report

The COVID-19 pandemic forced 30.4 per cent of local enterprises in Cameroon to resort to social media in the marketing of their products, a new report has shown.

According to the just-published report of the National Institute of Statistics (NIS) after an evaluation of the socio-economic impact of the coronavirus in the country in 2021, “This situation concerns the bigger enterprises to a greater extent (38.2%) and the small and medium size enterprises (36.9%) than the informal sector production units (19.3%).”

The report shows “This tendency was more prevalent in 2021 than in the previous year, 2020, and more than three enterprises in 10 declare having started using or increased their usage of digital platforms for their e-commerce.”

However, the report indicated that household revenues especially in the cities of Yaounde and Douala witnessed a drastic drop within the 2021 fiscal year.

“Throughout the national territory, more than five households out of 10 (53%) have witnessed a drop in revenue from their family businesses as compared to the period of 30 days before the study,” the report revealed.

“The level of this indicator is higher in the metropolitan cities of Yaounde (67%) and Douala (60%) and less in the rest of the country (47%).”

The NIS study confirmed the downward trend of household incomes observed during a similar study carried out during the second semester of 2020 shortly after the apparition of the coronavirus in the country in March 2020.

That first evaluation allowed the NIS to report a drop in household revenue in the two cities in comparison to the period before the COVID-19.

The first case of the coronavirus was detected in Cameroon on March 6, 2020 and since then, the virus has spread throughout the national territory resulting in a systematic increase in the number of contaminated persons and deaths.