Working from Douala: what to plan for
Connectivity, power cuts, time zones and meeting space. The four things that decide whether a working week goes smoothly.
Douala runs on West Africa Time, an hour ahead of London in winter, level with it in summer, an hour behind Paris. In practice a working day lines up with Europe without effort, and the US east coast is still reachable in the late afternoon. It is one of the country's real practical advantages for distributed teams.
Connectivity is good but rarely uniform. Plan on a local mobile data plan as a fallback: tethering from a phone gets you out of almost anything, and it is more reliable than hunting for a café with wifi the night before a presentation.
Power cuts happen and are part of how the city works. So the question to ask any accommodation is not whether they occur, but what takes over and how quickly. A building with a generator and a staffed technical room changes the experience of a working week completely.
For meetings, book real space rather than the corner of a restaurant. Background noise is the first enemy of a video call, and a dedicated room costs less than a meeting you have to hold twice. If you are hosting participants, put them in the same building: the logistics disappear at a stroke.
One last thing, easily forgotten: leave margin on your departure day. Journeys to the airport stretch quickly, and nobody has ever regretted waiting at the gate.
