One year after the start of the DSCE, an umbrella civil society association representing more than 25 groups, Dynamique Citoyenne, published an evaluation of its implementation. The DSCE's primary goals between 2010 and 2020 are to stimulate annual average economic growth of 5.5%, reduce poverty rates by more than 10% and reduce underemployment rates by more than 25%, particularly through large infrastructure and energy projects. The civil society evaluation monitored the implementation of 425 different actions that should have been realised by the end of 2010 for the successful completion of the document's objectives by 2020. The association found that for 39% of the indicators no progress had been made or no data were available, while only 5% of the objectives had been fully implemented. According to the report, many of the government's objectives are vague, while others—such as the completion of a gas terminal in Kribi by 2012—are unrealistic. Moreover, beyond weak implementation, the study criticised poor access to information and claimed that many ministries had not begun to reflect the DSCE objectives in their budgets or policies.

Nevertheless, the minister of planning, economy and regional development, Louis Paul Motaze, said that he was positive about achieving the objectives, although several challenges—such as increasing agricultural production and reducing the country’s dependency on imports—needed to be tackled. Unlike the World Bank, whose findings were published in an economic update in January, the Economist Intelligence Unit finds that the government's budgeted allocation for expenditure roughly matches the projected expenditure in the DSCE in percentage terms (actual allocation has been less, as the overall budget fell owing to revenue shortfalls). Despite the unsurprising overallocation for defence and security (and the questionably large allocation for the office of the presidency), the government has raised the allocation to the health sector, as well as to the rural sector and productive infrastructure. The 2011 budget even envisages a real decline in the allocation to the office of the presidency, although it is unclear whether this will be achieved in practice.

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The incongruence of the abysmal implementation record of DSCE projects on the one hand and the government's budgetary allocations on the other is a result of both poor execution and mismanagement. The government's expenditure controls are weak in practice, and this facilitates the corrupt practices that pervade the bureaucracy. However, the government's attempt to align expenditure patterns with those of its national development strategy should be seen as a positive development.