Doing Business: Rwanda promises to improve construction Permits Reforms

Rwanda has promised to do whatever possible to erase all obstacles that have led the World Bank Doing Business report to rank it in three digits category regarding the process of dealing with construction permits.

The World Bank Doing Business report, released Wednesday, ranked Rwanda at 106^th position in terms of dealing with the construction Permits.

Currently, it takes 113 days in Rwanda to get a construction permit.

In the report, the WB says he topic of dealing with construction permit tracked the procedures, time and cost to build a warehouse—including obtaining necessary the licenses and permits, submitting all required notifications, requesting and receiving all necessary inspections and obtaining utility connections.

In addition, the Dealing with Construction Permits indicator measures the building quality control index, evaluating the quality of building regulations, the strength of quality control and safety mechanisms, liability and insurance regimes, and professional certification requirements.

The ranking of economies on the ease of dealing with construction permits is determined by sorting their scores for dealing with construction permits. These scores are the simple average of the scores for each of the component indicators.

The report showed that Rwanda has scored 67.01 (Rank: 106) while Mauritius scored 82.51: (Rank: 15).

In the World Bank’s Doing Business Report 2014, Rwanda was ranked 85th on the indicator of construction permits, a year before it had been ranked 122nd.

In 2015 Rwanda ranked at 93^rd Position while in 2016 the country made the considerable improvement which positioned it at 32^nd, a move experts said “Something good were done at the time.”

Speaking to TOPAFRICANEWS, Head of Doing Business at Rwanda Development Board Tushabe Karim, said “As you might be aware countries are ranked depending on the competition.”

He noted that Rwanda has done well in other sectors as the report indicated, however, “the indicator of Dealing with Construction permit has showed us that we need to improve.”

Without much information, Tushabe said “In few days we are going to announce new measures taken in order to remove all barriers that have led us to the poor ranking in Dealing with construction Permit.”

Apart from the Construction permit ranking in general Rwanda has improved 11 places in the annual series of World Bank’s Doing Business Report, ranking 29th globally from the 41st the previous year.

The country retained its second position in Africa.

The report attributes the impressive score to improvements in Rwanda’s business regulatory environment captured in the various reforms the country undertook.

According to the World Bank report which ranked 190 countries against their level of business friendliness, Rwanda has the largest number of reforms approved in the Africa region.

“Having such a large leap is just an indicator of how serious you have taken this,” Yasser El- Gammal, the Word Bank Group Country Manager in Rwanda, told a group of senior government officials in Kigali yesterday.