Adoption of ICT by Cameroonians SMES: an impact study on the financial performance of Cameroonians SMES

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study the link between the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the financial performance of Cameroonian SMEs. This study was conducted using a hypothetico-deductive approach following a quantitative method. Our analysis is based on the RGE2 database from the INS. On a final sample of 5,892 companies obtained after auditing, according to the different selected criteria, we proceeded to the analysis of our data using a non-parametric hypothesis test (Kruskal Wallis) which proved to be the most adequate in relation to the structure of our final database. The results of the Kruskal Wallis tests show that the adoption of ICT positively improves the financial performance of Cameroonian SMEs. According to the criteria selected in this article, we can conclude that the use of the Internet for business operations and the use of an intranet network positively influence the financial performance of Cameroonian SMEs. The database used in this article has certainly evolved since collection in 2016. An analysis based on up-to-date data could lead to different results depending on the context and is therefore a limitation of our work.

Keywords: ICT, ICT adoption, performance, SME

JEL Classification: L25

Paper type: Empirical research