Not home-made: Historical and contemporary social policy dynamics in Cameroon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social policy development trajectories in post-colonial sub-Saharan African states deviate from those in highly industrialized countries. Recent research endeavours established broad patterns of global interdependencies dating back to colonialism. This article contributes to these efforts by presenting a case study of the dynamics animating social policy development in Cameroon. It examines the progressive evolution of global determinants and their impacts on Cameroon’s welfare system over three periods: (1) decolonialization and post-colonial restructuring in the mid-20th century, (2) structural adjustment in response to the 1980s’ debt crisis and (3) the contemporary era of market liberalization driven by accelerated economic globalization. The research draws on a mixed-methods approach involving a document analysis and a survey administered in 400 rural households. Findings indicate that horizontal interdependencies were predominant in the establishment phase of Cameroon’s national social insurance scheme, but eventually gave way to vertical interdependencies in the 1980s. Recent efforts to advance economic liberalization represent a return to horizontal transnational forces, given the growing influence of multinational corporations on the country’s social security landscape. The study reinforces existing research insights in showing that, unlike social protection in the global north, social policy dynamics in Africa tend to actively contribute to the marginalization of underprivileged groups.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".