Rwanda is the only Low-Income Country (LIC) among the top 100 countries listed as the easiest places to do business, according to the World Bank’s Doing Business Report 2019 released Wednesday. The Doing Business project, launched in 2002, provides impartial measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 190 economies and selected cities at the subnational and regional level. The project looks at domestic small and medium-size companies and measures the regulations applying to them through their life cycle According to the summary of the report, Rwanda moved up 11 places to 29th, down from 41 in last year’s Doing Business index, a tool that tracks the world’s most business-friendly economies. “Rwanda made starting a business less costly by replacing electronic billing machines with free software for value added tax invoices,” the report reads in part. Among the measures to which Rwanda’s good ranking was attributed was the move to replace the electronic billing machine system with freely distributed software from the Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) that allows taxpayers to issue VAT invoices from any computer. Rwanda improved on all but one of the ten Doing Business indicators, with the biggest gains recorded in getting electricity (number 119 to number 68, a 29 per cent gain in absolute terms) and resolving insolvency (from 79th to 58, reflecting a 20 per cent increase). Rwanda remains second easiest place in the world to register property, and third in the world for quality of credit information systems and procedures. “Since 2005, Rwandas consistent focus on business climate reform has produced the biggest cumulative improvement of all countries measured by Doing Business, rising from a low of 37.4/100 in 2005 (ranking worse than 150 globally) to 77.68/100 in 2018 (number 29),” reads a tweet from Rwanda Development Board. According to available data, it took 354 days on average to register property in Rwanda in 2005 and today, it takes an average of seven days. The figures also show that it cost the equivalent of 317 per cent of annual per capita income to register a new business in 2005 and currently it costs less than 15 per cent.
