A team led by Greg Binkert, the World Bank Director of Operations for Cameroon, made a surprise field visit to Matomb on Sunday, May 5, 2013. The team made up of Mr. Edward Olowo-Okere, the World Bank Director of Operations for Africa, Brian Quinn, Director of the Department of Loans, all the way from the World Bank Head Office in Washington DC. They were welcomed by Gabriel Ngan Baleba, the Mayor of the Matomb council.
In addition to the presentation of the process of planning which led to the drafting of the Council Development Plan of (CDP) in 2009, the visitors had the occasion to visit three of the seven achievements for which the Council received from PNDP’s financial assistance. That is in particular the rehabilitation of the village hall with VIP latrines and the Matomb grandstand, gathering and meeting places of the populations in the locality for all types of popular events. One will also note and most especially the supply of electricity to the Career neighborhood of one 1 basic km three-phase tension at the station of water treatment and its integration to the AES-SONEL network. The two other not visited projects relate to two wells equipped with a hand-pump in the villages of Nkongtock and Mbendjock, a drilling in Mbeng and a block of two classrooms at the bilingual high school of Manguen II.
For recall, the Matomb Council count 25,000 inhabitants divided into 24 villages and it  is extended over 625 km ². Since 2009 the Council have received F CFA 60 million from PNDP (Phase II) for the implementation of local projects, after the F CFA 29 million funding (Phase I) which enabled among other things to hire and pay the wages of two communal agents. One is a technical agent in charge of the follow-up of the CDP and the execution of projects, the animation of the managing committee of micro projects; and the other one, the financial agent in charge of the improvement of tax collection within the municipality.
This prodded the Mayor to wish “a subsequent increase of PNDP’s budget by the World Bank so that we can also benefit from it. For it was very difficult to convince the populations that all the projects which they had identified could not be financed.” In addition, Eugène Hagbé, the secretary general of the Matomb council underlined, “the success recorded with the management committees put in place with the support of PNDP helped us to widen the experience with other projects funded directly by the council or other financial donors”.
Jean Emile Nouga Ngom, the communal agent of development recruited by the Council with the support of PNDP informed the hosts that a census of the rural organizations was launched within the community in order to think until May 15th, 2013 in order to join them in reflecting on the ways and means to boost local economy.