The World Bank is set to support the country’s efforts to increase competitiveness to boost foreign exchange earnings and increase private investments.The Bank will for the next three years support the country’s Governance for Competitiveness Technical Assistance Project (G4C), aimed at enhancing competitiveness through supporting institutional capacity building. “We realised that what we needed is something small with high impact, short term flexibility enough to respond to Rwanda’s needs,” Mimi Ladipo, World Bank’s Country Manager for Rwanda said during the launch of the project in Kigali on MondayShe noted that the project, which is a technical assistance project, would help bridge the country’s gap in institutional capacity which is a bottleneck to competitiveness.The US$5 million project aims at strengthening the capacity of selected institutions and improve competitiveness in the country’s selected sectors such as horticulture and tourism.Moreover, the project will also support the implementation of national export strategy (NES) to boost horticultural and tourism exports, some of the key sectors targeted in the drive to bridge the country’s huge trade deficit.Alex Kanyankole of National Agricultural Export Board (NAEB), said the project would help strengthen the capacity of the board to boost horticultural exports which have seen an increase in both volumes and receipts.Last year, horticultural exports mainly vegetables and a few dry fruits earned the country over $20 million. Kanyankole called for more production to service the new and existing markets.“The whole objective is having critical number of exporters or producers who can produce according to the demands of these markets and continue to service these markets according to standards.”Indeed, this project comes at the right time to help the country to improve on (production of) horticultural products in terms of packaging, transportation and improving their standards and volumes. “This project will help us to identify new commodities that have competitiveness advantage in both old and new markets,” he said The country presently exports 35,000 metric tonnes of horticultural produce and fruits per annum. The head of tourism and conversation at Rwanda Development Board, Rica Rwigamba, noted that the project will help in diversification and skills gap of the tourism sector, the country’s leading foreign exchange earner.“There is still a lot of dependency on gorillas when you look at the higher market. This project is going to help us in packaging our products.” Trade and Industry Minister, Francois Kanimba, said the project would help the government to implement its key programmes that include the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS) and National Export Strategy to create jobs, bridge the trade deficit and reduce poverty.“I am hoping that the project will strengthen the public and private dialogue to help build the capacity of the private sector for greater policy formulation and advocacy.” Experts are optimistic that the project would respond to the country’s structural and capacity building constraints currently dogging competitiveness mainly in the horticultural and tourism sectors.
