Religion, capital social et réduction de la pauvreté au Cameroun: Le cas de la ville de Yaoundé

This paper inscribes itself in the logic of debates on the policies of poverty reduction which have been taking place for a decade now. The author evaluates the influence of social religious capital on the poverty of households in Cameroon and particularly in Yaounde. First he identifies the determinants of religious social capital on the basis of a composite indicator, obtained by taking into account the percentage of heads of families who respond affirmatively to the question: "Can you count on the financial support of your religious community, that is of its leaders or other members, in the form of a loan and/or a gift, in the case of illness, of the death of a family member, of a job loss or when you experience short-term financial difficulties ?" The performed estimations allow us to reach the conclusion that the answer to this question depends on the head of family's level of education, on the frequency of his/her perusal of the sacred book (the Bible or the Koran), on the frequency of his/her participation in meetings of his/her religious community and on the existence or the non-existence of a formal and/or informal system of support on which the head of family can count in unexpected situations. Afterwards the author makes use of three different models to estimate three indicators - of monetary poverty, of poverty of living conditions and of poverty of potentialities - on the basis of socioeconomic determinants and of religious variables which allow one to explain the level of resources of the religious social capital. The obtained results prove that these religious variables influence the poverty of households in Yaounde.