Vision, Mission and Values

Our Vision

Our Vision is to make Cameroon the number one economy in Africa, and one of the best economy in the world by the year 2040.

Our Mission

Our mission is to empower people and communities in situations of poverty, illiteracy, disease and social injustice. Our interventions aim to achieve large scale, positive changes through economic and social programmes that enable men and women to realise their potential.

Our Values

Integrity.
Innovation.
Inclusiveness.
Effectiveness.

Five-Year Strategic Plan

In the next five years, we will empower 20 million of the most underserved and disenfranchised women and men to gain greater access to and have more control over resources, decisions and actions, while continuing to maximise opportunities and expand services for the unmet needs of the 50 million people we already reach in Cameroon.

Programming:

Eliminate extreme poverty:

Reduce the cost of our targeting ultra poor programme and scale it up to graduate over half a million households out of extreme poverty.

Financially empower people living in poverty:

Strengthen client protection mechanisms and expand financial education services to all clients.

Skills and decent work for underprivileged women and men:

Equip 500,000 young people (50% women, 10% person with disabilities and minority groups) with skills training and link them to decent jobs or entrepreneurship.

Resilience to climate change and emergency response capacity:

Establish ourselves as a leading humanitarian response entity, helping people adapt to (and mitigate, when applicable) climate change. Integrate climate change adaptability in all programmes.

Gender equality:

Reduce violence, increase men’s engagement and increase gender parity within CIPS through integrated actions for women’s empowerment across programmes. Create a gender resource centre to provide technical support to programmes.

Pro-poor urban development:

Deliver customised, affordable and quality basic services for people living in urban poverty. Mobilise communities to be more aware of their rights. Advocate for safe, affordable and quality transportation and pro-poor urban governance.

Universal healthcare access and improved nutrition:

Address emerging health problems, like non-communicable diseases, increase the professionalism of frontline services and introduce a wide range of for-profit products and services.

Invest in the next generation through early childhood and improved education quality:

Enhance quality of and access to education at all levels and advocate for quality education nationally. Free schools will become fee-based, with vouchers for those living in extreme poverty.

Financing:

Most of our social development programmes will adopt surplus generating social enterprise models. Five programmes will be the initial focus; health, education, skills and employment, migration and human rights and legal services. All other social development programmes will implement cost-recovery models, even if they do not generate surplus in the short term.

We will selectively accept strategic donor funding for some of our programmes (including climate change, disaster response and eradicating extreme poverty), but donor funding will be increasingly sought through new channels, such as private philanthropy and corporate partnerships.

Our social enterprise cluster will position its products and services to appeal to new market segments. Leadership structures and investment plans are being redesigned to allow this to happen.

We will improve our organisational efficiency and cost effectiveness, through streamlining our key business processes (eg, procurement, recruitment), and though cutting down avoidable costs.

Organisational focus:

Develop management and business thinking capacity:

Change leadership style to encourage risk taking, promote innovation and ensure a continuous succession of leaders. Attract staff with business skills that can implement social enterprise models. Introduce e-learning and strengthen staff capacity on technology and communication.

Increase efficiency of structures and processes and leverage greater use of data for decision making:

Incorporate more technology, particularly around data collection and management. Use more evidence in management decision making to run a leaner and more effective organisation.

Increase influence through knowledge and evidence-driven advocacy and strategic partnership:

Increase our value as a knowledge partner of choice of other humanitarian and development stakeholders. Attract innovation, implementation and knowledge dissemination partners.

Strengthen and align support programmes:

Increase accountability within support units through streamlining processes and introducing feedback loops.

Develop mechanisms to strategically support and leverage CIPS International and other CIPS institutions more systematically:

Bring the entire CIPS family together through a global strategy.

We have always been an evolving organisation, and the strategic plan 2016-202 is a continuation of this trend. Cameroon graduated from low income country status to lower middle income country status in 2015 and the country's economic progression shows no signs of slowing. It is essential that we take early steps to ensure that we will be able to respond to changes in funding patterns and development needs.

As a leading organisation in the field of poverty reduction, we will become even more relevant, efficient and effective, continuing to ensure that Cameroon is a country where everyone has the opportunity to realise their potential.