Doing Business reforms to increase investments

Rwanda Development Board (RDB) has said that wide ranging reforms it has carried out since the start of this year should enable Rwanda’s economy to consolidate gains made towards attracting more investments in line with the country’s aspirations for transformation. Through an information memorandum availed exclusively to The New Times, RDB says that, its ‘Doing Business National Task Force’, a specialized business reform unit, has spearheaded and undertaken deeper and wider ranging reforms in eight of the ten indicators of the World Bank’s Doing Business programmes, as at mid this year. For the third year running, the World Bank’s Doing Business reports, which now serve an indicator of measuring the ease and constraints related to doing business, has given Rwanda the highest rating in terms of instituting the widest array of business reforms within the East African Community. “What we have done as RDB is to build up these ten indicators after closely studying their underlying loopholes. The idea was to further ease doing business in Rwanda”, Frank Twagira, the coordinator of the taskforce at RDB said. Technically, this means that RDB has gone beyond the ten indicators for the purposes of further deepening reforms within Rwanda’s business landscape. “Whereas we are adhering to World Bank standards of carrying our reforms, our unique home grown approach entails going beyond the set reform standards for the purposes of ensuring sustainability of the companies coming to do business in Rwanda,” Twagira added. Consequently, RDB says that these reforms are now yielding tremendous results, adding that the results include, what it terms as a ‘huge increment’ in the registration of new businesses within its counters at the newly instituted in-house registrar of companies. RDB officials added that Rwanda now offers best practise lessons on business reforms to a number of countries in the region such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South Sudan, Zambia and even Kenya. Notable among the reforms carried out so far this year, are those related to construction permits in which the down time has been reduced from 210 days to less than 30 days. Within the same breath, RDB has now facilitated the establishment of a one stop centre to ease issuance of all relevant paper work needed to assist real estate developers to start construction. Closely related to these reforms targeting the real estate sector is the formulation of a service charter by the national land centre which should substantially reduce time frames for delivery of documents related to all aspects of land acquisition by developers. Ends