NEWS

The Global LPG Partnership (GLPGP) has commenced work under a Technical Assistance grant from the African Development Bank for three LPG development projects in Cameroon.

The US$500,000 grant will scale up the production and distribution of clean cooking solutions while ensuring regulatory compliance. save lives that would otherwise have been lost by Indoor Air Pollution by reducing risk of developing pneumonia (a leading killer of children under 5 years of age), support households to save costs on cooking fuels thus relieve their economic burden, and empower women and girls as they can spend less time collecting fuels and cooking. The project will also directly support women entrepreneurs with the training and capacity building.

In Cameroon, the technical assistance programme has three components: (i) women’s entrepreneurship program, (ii) nationwide safety audit of LPG filling plants, and (iii) training and certification program for LPG distributors.

Under the women’s entrepreneurship training, GLPGP together with Cameroonian implementing partners are providing start-up support – including entrepreneurship training and LPG distribution training, start-up capital, and working capital loans – to help women establish community-level LPG distribution businesses. The call for registrations, made through women’s associations, received overwhelming response. The initial cohort of women is slated to graduate from the program by the end of 2019.

The second component of the technical assistance comprises a safety audit of LPG filling plants in Cameroon. The audit was conducted in May 2019 to identify gaps versus existing safety requirements and recommend steps to address them. The report was shared with the Ministry of Water Resources and Energy and other stakeholders in September 2019. This project will help to strengthen Cameroon’s LPG regulatory environment and to ensure future compliance with necessary LPG safety standards. 

Under the third component, there will be training and certification of LPG distributors. Drawing on its extensive global experience and knowledge base, GLPGP developed and adapted for local conditions a set of best practices for LPG distribution, to be adopted by distributors across different regions of Cameroon. The resultant Distributor Training Manual was used by GLPGP to train and certify about 400 Cameroonian LPG distributors during September 2019.

These activities are part of GLPGP’s ongoing partnership with the Government of Cameroon to implement its National LPG Master Plan. The Master Plan comprises investments in LPG equipment and improvements in supply chain logistics, as well as policy and regulatory enhancements.