Rwanda is lining up an extensive study to understand the dynamics of its digital economy.
The Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA), the institution taking lead in the study, says there are a number of "grey areas” that need to be understood as far as the local digital economy is concerned, so that policy makers will ably take appropriate decisions.
According to Innocente Murasi, the Commissioner for Strategy and Risk Analysis at RRA, the study aims at finding out what digital services are consumed locally, their size, their suppliers and consumers, among other things.
She noted: "Like any other aspect of markets, we need to understand what services we are talking about when we refer to Rwanda's digital economy. Is it just services like Google and Netflix, or does it even cover the software that we purchase online?"
"We have to define what we mean by digital services. Secondly, we need to explore who are the consumers, what is the size of the consumer base, and who are the suppliers?"
When they have laid hold on such information and more, researchers are expected to make an analysis that will be submitted to policy makers for consideration so as to plan for the next steps of promoting Rwanda's digital economy in line with the country’s development ambitions.
The study has not yet started as RRA is still trying to collect some primary data from institutions like the National Bank of Rwanda (BNR), telecom companies and the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA).
It is expected that such data may be available to RRA by December. After that, the analysis will take shape.
"We met with the concerned institutions and agreed that they are going to give us some information needed for a deeper analysis. These are, for example, RURA, BNR, telecom companies,” Murasi said.
"After getting such information on the digital services, we will try to learn from other countries and see how they are dealing with them. For example, we will look at the countries which managed to tax them; how they did it and what challenges that met. Then we will have to submit our findings to policy makers,” she added.
On an important note, Murasi noted, policy makers deliberate on whether decisions such as levying a Value Added Tax (VAT) on particular digital services will support what Rwanda wants to achieve in terms of deepening digital service usage or not.
The government of Rwanda has targets of digitizing the Rwandan society through increased use of information and communications technology (ICT) as a crosscutting enabler for the development of other sectors to "championing Rwanda's digital transformation.”