The legislative process to establish a national startup act has reached the advanced stage with the Ministry of ICT and Innovation assuring that the procedure ‘must’ be finalized this year.

The development, that seeks to among others support the entrepreneurship and business ecosystem in the country, was initially announced last year, but activities were halted by the outbreak of the pandemic.

Startup Acts are an emerging legislative instrument to package strategic incentives and interventions to accelerate the formation and sustained scale of innovative and high-growth firms.

With a law that sets out government’s policies for startup growth, the government seems to be taking a more proactive role to drive startup growth and the country hopes that the Startup Act will spur the development of the tech-based services industry.

"The law is being finalized at the Ministry level, before it can undergo the normal procedure by the end of this year,” Angellos Munezero, Director-General of Innovation and Business Development at the Ministry of ICT and Innovation told The New Times in an exclusive interview.

Despite the impact of the pandemic, Munezero attributed the delay in the conviction that the national startup act is an instrument that is going to bundle incentives for startups, which need a detailed ecosystem assessment.

He pointed out that some of the incentives that have already been thought of include waiving of tax, support from the government for being labelled as startups, among others.

"We are still in talks with all associated stakeholders to negotiate and agree on incentives for our startups to make sure that we develop our ecosystem,” he added, "We have also been engaging local startups, to come up with that an ecosystem assessment report that entails all proposals.”

This, he highlighted is expected to develop local innovation, realize more concepts from the young talent as well as export other homegrown innovative solutions.

"We want to see more innovation start-ups emerging, scaling their solutions to the region and even the African continent and generally worldwide,”

Since the first Small Business Act in Africa, passed by Ghana in 1981, governments across the African region have been increasingly legislating to support entrepreneurship.

In the last three years, Startup Acts have become a popular mechanism to package reforms.

Rwanda has embarked on the process, after already passing a number of laws supporting businesses, such as the Investment Code.

Once in place, Munezero thinks the move presents a win-win scenario as the government expects a boost in the tax base.

"In the long run, government, ESOs are also expected to reap from this move because the start-ups will have to expand to the continent and also big corporates, this is a win-win.”