In the dry season of 2025, I sat in the manager's office of a microfinance institution on Commercial Avenue, Bamenda. The fan was not working. The lights were cutting in and out because of ghost town days. On the desk were three things: a ledger of unpaid loans, a newspaper headline about ongoing insecurity, and a framed certificate that read "Best MFI in the Northwest Region, 2019."
The manager looked at me and said a sentence I have not forgotten:
"We are not failing because we don't know how to lend. We are failing because we don't know who we are when things go bad."
That sentence is what this book is about.
Between 2020 and 2025, I watched six commercial banks, fourteen microfinance institutions, and three credit unions in Bamenda navigate a prolonged convergence of shocks: armed conflict in the Northwest and Southwest regions, the aftershocks of COVID-19, inflation, capital flight, and a youth population that represented both the greatest credit risk and the greatest market opportunity. Some institutions closed branches or surrendered their licenses. Some merely survived. And a few, against all expectations, grew their loan portfolios and reported positive returns.
The difference was rarely the interest rate. It was rarely the core banking software. It was rarely the donor grant.
The difference was culture. Specifically, _risk culture_: the shared assumptions, values, and behaviors about how risk is identified, discussed, and acted upon inside an institution when no supervisor from Yaoundé or COBAC is present.
This book asks the question that kept me up at night during those five years: Does risk culture explain why some financial institutions in Bamenda remain profitable in crisis, while others do not?
The answer matters because Bamenda is not an outlier. I believe it is a preview. Cities across the Sahel, the Great Lakes, and other fragile and conflict-affected contexts face the same combination of insecurity, informality, and financial pressure. If I can understand how culture protects profitability here, maybe we can protect livelihoods in similar settings elsewhere.
