The Role of Banking Institutional Services on the Sustainable growth of SMEs in Cameroon

Banking institutions have been very instrumental to the growth of Small and Medium Sized enterprises in many developed economies, and they have been considered as one of the principal driving forces for economic development. The case has not been the same for Cameroon as owner managers of these SMEs have been complaining of the limited presence of banking institutions in solving their problems. Mindful of the fact that Cameroon has a growth vision to become an emerging economy by 2035, the country had to take giant steps to boast the growth of SME in the country. Some of these steps were the introduction of the small business law in 2010. This was all in a drive to ensure that SME play a vital role to the GDP growth, reduce unemployment, alleviate poverty and act as an engine for the country’s emergence growth drive. It is therefore in this light that a study was carried out on the role of banking institutional services on the sustainable growth of SME in Cameroon. A logistic regression model was adopted to examine the impact of banking institutions on the growth of SMEs in Cameroon. The data used in the study was extracted from the 2016 Cameroon Enterprise Survey which was collected from 361 enterprises by the National Institute of Statistics in the country. From the empirical results, it was discovered that 68.4% of the enterprises were growing as opposed to the 31.6%. Despite the high growth rate of these SME bank loans were affecting the growth of SME negatively while MFI loans, electronic banking services, internal funds and research and development were positively contributing to the growth of SME in the country. Thus, we concluded the study by emphasisng the implementation of relationship lending which will contribute positively to the growth of SMEs and more so fiscal policies should be ameliorated to boast the growth of startups businesses.