A shared evidence system makes industrial coordination accountable

Public authorities and private factory operators ask different questions of the cotton-to-garment system, and forcing both into a single undifferentiated report corrupts both decisions.[S02][S1301] A national coordinator needs to know how much domestic lint is produced, how much enters first-stage domestic conversion beyond ginning, what capacity is genuinely commissioned and operating, and whether public commitments generate net domestic value added and sustained jobs.[S03][S29][S34] A plant manager needs shift-level visibility into lot quality, machine availability, first-pass yield, rework, order fulfilment, energy and water per saleable unit, and the cash conversion cycle.[S10][S12]

When national monitoring relies on unverified project announcements, planned capacity is easily confused with realised throughput.[R08][R09][R10] In the inherited evidence register, press accounts report an announced consolidation between SODECOTON and CICAM targeted by 2030 alongside the announced Camtext SA investment of US$300 million (180 billion XAF) dated 12 November 2025, citing 12,000 tonnes a year of processed volume, about 12,000 jobs at Dibamba and 3,000 at Garoua, an 11-year return horizon and optimal capacity around 2033.[R08][R09][R10] Meanwhile, July 2023 press reporting recorded historical capacity utilisation of 33.7 percent at Garoua, 48.9 percent at CICAM 1 and 10.83 percent at CICAM 2, with underutilisation costing about XAF 2 billion in 2020.[R12] Treating announced future capacity as current supply, or historical nameplate equipment as active conversion capability, obscures the actual processing gap.[S02][S06]

To prevent that distortion, GFT proposes separating the evidence architecture into four layers: shop-floor lot and shift capture, plant-level reconciliation, a national project-status register and an aggregated national material-balance indicator set.[S19][S29] The World Bank's Statistical Performance Indicators framework emphasises that useful national statistics draw on administrative and private-firm records alongside traditional surveys, governed by clear standards and dialogue between data producers and users.[S1301] In Cameroon, the Institut National de la Statistique (INS), placed under the technical supervision of the ministry in charge of statistics, maintains enterprise-statistics and economic-synthesis departments alongside a national quality-assurance framework and administrative-data guidelines.[S1302] Linking industrial reporting to those established conventions avoids creating parallel ministry spreadsheets that cannot be reconciled with customs or national-accounts series.[S19][S23][S1302]

Exhibit 55 illustrates how factory records and national registers exchange verified summaries without exposing confidential pricing or customer identities.[S11][S19][S29]

As Exhibit 55 shows, the bottom two layers belong to the operating enterprise, while the upper two layers serve industrial coordination and public statistics.[S19][S1301] What this diagram cannot establish is an existing data-sharing mandate or an automated link between Cameroonian mills and statistical agencies; establishing the reporting protocol requires explicit legal and administrative agreement.[S34][S1302]

The most common accounting failure in multi-stage textile programmes is double counting across vertical stages.[S04][S29] In international commodity statistics, the OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook defines cotton consumption strictly as the transformation of cotton fibres by mills into yarn.[S29] Once ginned lint enters a spinning mill and is spun into yarn, that fibre has crossed the boundary from raw agricultural commodity to industrially transformed material.[S04][S29] If that yarn is subsequently transferred to a domestic weaving or knitting mill, and the resulting fabric is cut and sewn into garments by a domestic apparel plant, three factories perform real industrial work, but only one quantity of domestic lint is taken off the raw-export market.[S12][S29]

If a national scorecard simply adds the cotton-equivalent weight reported by spinners, weavers, knitters and garment makers, a single lot of domestic fibre is counted two or three times, creating the illusion that Cameroon is approaching its 50 percent transformation ambition while raw lint exports remain near their historical 95 percent share.[R06][R07][S01] Conversely, if a garment factory launches operations using imported fabric under a cut-make-trim (CMT) model, its output generates domestic jobs and assembly value added, yet its contribution to domestic lint transformation is zero.[S12][S29]

GFT therefore recommends two accounting rules for the national register.[S19][S29] First, the national lint-transformation numerator must record domestic-origin ginned lint once at the point where it enters its first qualifying domestic conversion stage beyond ginning (typically spinning into yarn).[S04][S06][S29] Second, downstream fabric formation, wet processing and garment assembly must be tracked in separate stage accounts measuring stage-specific throughput, conversion yield, domestic lint content share and net domestic value added after subtracting intermediate inputs.[S03][S29]

Exhibit 56 visualises this illustrative reconciliation from naive multi-stage summation back to the true first-conversion lint intake.[S04][S19][S29]

As Exhibit 56 demonstrates, nearly two-thirds of the un-reconciled activity total in an integrated chain consists of internal transfers and imported intermediates rather than fresh domestic lint intake.[S19][S29] While the exhibit clarifies the accounting mechanism, it cannot reveal the actual magnitude of double counting in Cameroon's historical estimates because published sector studies do not provide a plant-by-plant input-output reconciliation table.[S01][S06]