Low technical capacity hampers access to finance -officials

Lack of technical capacity in business skills to develop viable business proposals is seen as one of the major challenges to access finances, government official has said. Emmanuel Hategeka, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Trade and Industry said that stakeholder’s interventions should focus on human resource development and provide specific firm level capacity building for competitiveness. This was during the second day of the development partners meeting at Serena. “Interventions by stakeholders targeted to private sector development should aim to improve business environment with a view to reducing the cost of doing business,” Hategeka said during his presentation. Other challenges that hamper access to financing include, high cost to recruit experts to design projects, low aggregate savings, limited access to nation wide Internet coverage, limited access to electricity and infrastructure constraints. John Gara, Chief Executive Officer of Rwanda Development Board also commented on high transportation costs that increase the cost of doing business and limits access to foreign markets. “High transportation costs average at $165 per ton compared to $95 in the region,” said Gara. According to officials, a private public dialogue is being established to address priority bottlenecks and it’s expected to address critical constraints to business, build and implement of doing business taskforce. Areas of interventions are to support export diversification initiatives, promote economic empowerment of small and medium enterprises and support regional integration agenda and internationalization of domestic private sector. In line to address the challenges of skills, trainings are being conducted through private sector development projects aimed at entrepreneurial skills and development of a number of one stop Business Development services centres. Ends