RWANDAN GOVERNMENT INTRODUCED 15 NEW BUSINESS REFORMS

The government plans to roll out 15 new reforms across various sectors over the next six months, as a means to ease doing business in the country. 

The development follows recent World Bank Doing Business Report that ranked Rwanda 41st globally and second in Africa out of the 190 economies globally. 

The reforms are informed by the report and attempt to address key concerns of investors across the World Bank Doing Business report's indicators. 

For instance, under access to electricity, Rwanda ranked 119th globally and under this indicator, government plans to introduce five reforms by May next year, to ensure adequate and constant energy supply to investors. 

Rwanda Energy Group (REG) is working on a system that will monitor outages and record frequency and durations of power outages so that it is predictable for people running factories. 

The Government also seeks to reduce the time for connection from the current 34 days to 20 days as well as revising tariffs to introduce preferential rates for productive users. 

Other reforms under the indicator include introducing electricity quality service codes and reducing the cost of connection. 

Under the quality service codes, Karim Tushabe, the head of doing business unit at Rwanda Development Board (RDB), said that the reform will ensure that scheduled power outages do not affect investors' productivity. 

If an outage goes beyond the agreed time, REG will be required to compensate firms that loose productivity. 

"This is a rule from RURA saying that should people get a power outage, which goes past the agreed outage time, they should be paid as it is a deterrence, it is sort of checking the Rwanda Energy Group to protect investors from losing due to outages," he said. 

Another indicator scheduled for reforms is dealing with construction permits which featured at 112th position globally. 

The government is planning to introduce a risk based approach for Environmental Impact Assessment whereby projects will be evaluated in accordance to their risk factor. 

This, the Government says, is likely to reduce time and cost incurred by contractors as well as eliminate numerous procedures cited by the report's authors. 

Tushabe said RDB is in disagreement with the way the report's authors captured a previous reform under the building permits systems. 

He said that despite the permitting system being online and reducing the time taken to acquire a permit, the authors have probably not understood its impact. 

"We are inviting them on ground; take them through how the system operates so that they can really see how it works. It's partly because of communication and understanding of the reform and impacts to the targeted investors," he said. 

"We will also employ someone in communication to ensure users have a good understanding of reforms."

News Date: 13 / 11 / 2017
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