Document Cameroon or We Disappear

In the AI age, Cameroon’s biggest risk is not that we won’t use AI. It’s that we will be invisible in data. AI learns from what is written, saved, searchable, and shared. If our country is not documented well, the tools of the future will not understand us. Even our own people using AI will get weak answers about Cameroon because the source material is missing. We will be forced to depend on outside context forever, and we’ll keep struggling with "basic things" that should be easy to find.

When people talk about innovation in Cameroon, they often jump to incubators, pitch events, hubs, and big programs. Respect to places like ActivSpaces, Dev Communities (GDGs, WTMs....), and others trying to help. But the real problem is deeper than "we need more incubators." Many of these places still run on old-school systems where you have to be "nice" to the guard, then nice to the manager, then nice to a jury. It’s just the government way of doing things with a "tech" sticker on it. The real problem is we lack the basics: infrastructure, practical information, and public systems that help normal people move faster without asking for favors.

We don’t have enough clear documentation on how life and business work here. How to start a company. Where to register it. What papers to bring. What it costs. What office to go to. What to do next. Some influencers will drop a long PDF link once in a while, but it’s not simple, not step-by-step, and not specific. Most of the time, the real information is hidden in people’s heads or locked inside small WhatsApp groups where it eventually disappears and becomes useless to everyone else.

We need something like news.ycombinator (Hacker News), but for us. In places like that, you get high-value updates "back-to-back." You read an article in the morning, and it changes how you do business in the afternoon. We don't have that "high-signal" feed where we can trust every link. We also see the big trend of people trying to leave the country - the "mexico move". Right now, that info is scattered. People are getting scammed or wasting millions because they don’t know which document to get first. If all those practical steps were in one place, documented by people who have done it, we wouldn’t be guessing or begging for info in group chats.

Right now, if you want to grow, you might read global news and it’s good. But after reading, you still come back and start researching again: “What works in Cameroon?” “How do people do it here?” “Where do I find this locally?” That is the gap. We don’t lack smart people. We lack local, practical, searchable knowledge. We lack data on which hospitals are located where and what they are specialized in. Currently, only about 2% of the data used to train AI comes from the whole of Africa. That means AI is learning the world through a Western lens, and we are being left out.

People will say "social media can do it." But social media is a noisy place. A few good write-ups get buried under ads, celebrity gist, and "asses." The timeline is not a library. You can’t easily go back, search, compare, and learn step-by-step. Serious progress needs places built for value, not vibes. We need review boards where a guy who just bought a bad modem on Glotelho can write a review so his neighbor doesn't buy the same "Chinese version" with a short range. Sometimes a small newsletter of just 100 people with the same drive is more powerful than a million followers on TikTok because it focuses on a specific problem.

Another big issue is culture: we don’t try and document enough. People are building, yes. But we don’t write down what we learn. We don’t share the process. We don’t leave a trail for the next person. And when we do share, we often don’t want to do it for free. Life is hard and time is money, but ecosystems only grow when people create a base layer of shared knowledge. You can monetize later, but first, the knowledge must exist so we can all stop starting from zero every single time.

This is for everybody, not just tech founders. A child in Bambili should be able to Google jobs around, find them, and apply. A student should be able to review school restaurants so others know where the food is actually good. Someone in Loum should be able to find services, clinics, and opportunities without "knowing someone." The big guys like MTN and Orange should be documenting more, but while the older people keep things "centralized," we as young people can build our own decentralized libraries. We can read, we can share, and we can document our own reality before the AI age makes us invisible.

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In case you're wondering, that's what i'm trying to turn ngano.org to. A space where smart people like yourself can share things for me to read/learn from.. In case you have interesting reads put the up on https://ngano.org/l. In case you think you should be sharing some cool articles, send me an email at malico@ngano.org