Burundi works at improving business

BUJUMBURA, Burundi - Dr. Gervais Rufyikiri, the Burundi Second Vice- President, has requested technocrats to quicken implementation of reforms that will improve the country’s business climate.

He was speaking recently during an inventory of the business climate reforms, an important step towards the finalization of the 2015 Doing Business report that the government will submit to the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Every year, the IFC, part of the World Bank Group, publishes the Doing Business survey that reflects countries performance in making it easy for business to flourish.

In his opening remarks of the workshop, Dr. Rufyikiri said, since 2011 a continuous improvement of Doing Business indicators has been one of the major concerns of the government.

He said this is why, “The Decision Committee and Technical Working Groups (TWG) on the business climate are still at work and doing so tirelessly to propose reforms to be initiated and implemented for each indicator by the various institutions to promote investments in Burundi.”

He recalled that Burundi ranked 169th in 2011, but is now on the 140th place in the latest report of 2014.

He said the reforms already undertaken were significant in reducing costs, procedures and time to run business in Burundi. He said these reforms will help to get a dynamic private sector, which can generate employment and income for the population and therefore stimulate the economic and social development of Burundi.

He said since June 2013, many laws have been revised as part of improving the business climate. He was pleased at the time of presentation of the preliminary report three bills had already been analyzed by the Council of Ministers including the Commercial Code and the Code of private companies and ones with public shareholding, the law on accession to the Convention Hague abolishing the Requirement of legislation for Foreign Public Documents called ‘Apostille Convention’, the law on accession to the Convention on the recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards called ‘New York Convention’.

Many other bills are waiting to be reviewed by the Council of Ministers or have already been enacted.

The Second Vice- President congratulated members of the TWG for their outstanding work already completed.

He advised them to continue in the same way and even redouble their efforts to finalize the report in time. He also asked officials of various institutions and government departments involved in these reforms to accelerate the implementation of initiated reforms to achieve a better ranking in the 2015 Doing Business Report.

By Renovat Nimbona, Monday, April 07th, 2014


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