Rwanda has improved 11 places in the annual series of World Bank’s Doing Business Report, ranking 29th globally from the 41st the previous year. The country retained its second position in Africa.

The report, released Wednesday, attributes the impressive score to improvements in Rwanda’s business regulatory environment captured in the various reforms the country undertook.

According to the World Bank report which ranked 190 countries against their level of business friendliness, Rwanda has the largest number of reforms approved in the Africa region.

"Having such a large leap is just an indicator of how serious you have taken this,” Yasser El- Gammal, the Word Bank Group Country Manager in Rwanda, told a group of senior government officials in Kigali yesterday.

These are the key highlights

from the report

1.Rwanda is the 29th in the ease of doing business in the world. In Africa, the country is second behind Mauritius, which has also maintained its position for the second consecutive year.

2.Rwanda has scored the second position globally after New Zealand when it comes to the aspect of registering property. It is one of the 10 indicators that WB measures.

It was attributed to the fact that the country improved on its land dispute resolution mechanisms. It now takes only 7 days to transfer property and costs only 0.1 per cent of the property value, the same as in New Zealand.

3.Rwanda featured as one of the 10 economies showing the most notable improvements in the report. It is among the four of the top Africa’s economies that have improved significantly. These are Togo, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, and Rwanda.

Over the past 12 months, collectively these economies implemented a total of 23 reforms.

4.Rwanda’s ease of doing business score improved from 73.73 in the 2018 report to 77.88 in this year’s index. This means that in the last year Rwanda has improved its business regulations as captured by the report indicators in absolute terms.

The report says the country is narrowing the gap with the global regulatory best practice.

5.Rwanda implemented the largest number of reforms. In 2017/2018, the country implemented seven new reforms that improved business regulatory framework. These are the second highest number of reforms the country has undertaken since the launch of the reports.

Generally, economies in Sub Saharan Africa set a new record for a third consecutive year, carrying out 107 reforms in the past year to improve the ease of doing business for domestic, small and medium enterprises

In Africa, much of the reform activity in the past year focused on improvements in the area of Enforcing Contracts, with the region’s 27 reforms accounting for more than half of the reforms recorded in that area globally.

Rwanda particularly issued new rules of civil procedures which limit adjournments to unforeseen and exceptional circumstances.

6.Some of the continent’s economies perform best in the areas of Getting Credit and Starting a Business, with four economies – Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia – ranked among the world’s top 10 in Getting Credit ranking.

Rwanda got 3rd place on the aspect of access to credit. This is because the country enacted a new insolvency law.

Claver Gatete, the Minister for Infrastructure, said the reforms that the country has been implementing have translated into tangible results for businesses operating in Rwanda.

"For instance, in the past, following the introduction of the electronic online registration, domestic business registration have increased from 418 in 2008 to now 13,394 in 2017,” he noted.

The minister also highlighted that the cost of starting a business in Rwanda has reduced from 317 per cent of GDP per capita in 2005 to less than 15 per cent in 2018.

But the report advised Rwanda to improve its process of dealing with construction permits, an area where it ranked 106 globally.

Currently, it takes 113 days in Rwanda to get a construction permit.

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