The report comes from the World Bank’s assessment of 190 countries.
The Country Manager of the World Bank Group in Rwanda, Yasser El- Gammal, said that “Mauritius, ranked 20th in the world and Rwanda are the only African countries that made it in the top 30 in the world.”
The CEO of the Rwanda Development Board, Clare Akamanzi, welcomed the move and attributed the success to Rwanda’s ambitious approach to reforming its business environment.
“We are pleased to have moved up 11 places to 29, from 41 in last year’s Doing Business report. Rwanda has adopted a very bold and ambitious approach to reforming its business environment and we will continue working on further improvements in keeping with our vision of a private sector-led economic transformation”.
As highlighted in the report, Rwanda is the only Low-Income Country (LIC) in the Top 30, and the only one in the Top 100. Nearly 75% of the Top 30 are High-Income Countries (HICs) with per annual per capita income above $12,000.
Rwanda also improved on all but one of the ten Doing Business indicators, with the biggest gains recorded in Getting Electricity (119 to 68, a 29% gain in absolute terms) and Resolving Insolvency (79 to 58, reflecting a 20% increase in the absolute score).
According to Doing Business statistics, Rwanda remains second in the world for ease of registering property, and 3rd in the world for quality of credit information systems and procedures.
The nation also improved its rank on ease of starting a business by replacing the electronic billing machine system with free software from the Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) that allows taxpayers to issue VAT invoices from any computer.
In 2018, Rwanda also returns to the list of the Top 10 biggest reformers over the previous year. Since 2005, Rwanda’s consistent focus on business climate reform has produced the biggest cumulative improvement of all countries measured by Doing Business, rising from a low of 37.4/100 in 2005 (ranking worse than 150 globally), to 77.68/100 in 2018 (29).
Some examples of what this means in real terms: (1) According to Doing Business data, it took 354 days on average to register property in Rwanda in 2005; in 2018 it takes an average of 7 days. (2) It cost the equivalent of 317% of annual per capita income to register a new business in 2005; it costs less than 15% in 2018.
Leave a Reply