Kenya on Tuesday urged African governments to set up independent investment portals to enhance interaction with foreigners seeking to launch operations within their countries.

Kenya Investment Authority Managing Director, Dr Moses Ikiara, said its e-regulations platform received 20,600 enquiries from potential investors drawn from 100 countries.

Dr Ikiara told an international conference on Ease of Doing Business Initiative at Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi yesterday that going digital would further deepen interaction with investors leading to meaningful dialogue as compared to a one-stop-shop for all State services.

“Huduma Centre is a great initiative for Kenyans but the outside world as well as local investors need a specific portal to engage knowledgeable advisors on matters investment,” said Dr Ikiara.

Industrialisation Cabinet Secretary Adan Mohamed said Kenya moved fast to ease conditions of doing business as a prerequisite to attracting investments, accelerating economic growth, creating job opportunities and wealth.

“African governments must be ready to work together, with key partners such as the World Bank and International Finance Group, alongside local and international private sector organisations to consolidate gains made on the business reforms made in 2015,” he said.

Mr Mohamed said while economic outlook showed Africa would grow at 5.1 per cent, there is need to translate the impressive growth indicators into tangible gains that impact positively on the living standards for all citizens.

---

Kenya hosts ease of doing business conference

The Government of Kenya is hosting the 7th Ease of Doing Business Initiative (EDBI) Conference from May 3rd 2016 to May 6th 2016 at the Safari Park Hotel Nairobi, Kenya.

The EDBI Conference is a peer-to-peer learning event requested by African countries and supported by the World Bank Group, to facilitate knowledge sharing on Doing Business reforms. It aims at showcasing and facilitating replication of best practice, best fit in reforming, ideas, opinions and expertise on the legal and institutional framework underpinning successful business environment reforms in order to help pave the way for bigger and better business and increased investment flows in Sub Saharan Africa. More specifically, this knowledge transfer gathering offers an excellent opportunity for the participating African countries to learn from each other’s experience in implementing reforms thereby facilitating job creation by the private sector.

The theme for this year’s conference is ‘Digitizing Business – Leveraging ICT to enhance the Business Environment’. The 3-day conference will bring together over 300 delegates drawn from government, industry and business leaders as well as international investors, economists and academics from Africa.

The objectives of the EDBI 2016 are to:

• Facilitate sharing of knowledge and experience on investment climate reforms in Africa; and

• Improve the investment climate and increase the region’s share of investment flows and export markets, in line with the stated regional economic integration objectives of the involved Regional Economic Communities and Member States.

• Facilitate the showcasing of best practice under one roof, encourage political buy-in and follow-through of committed reform agenda covering various sectors.

Background

The Doing Business Report is an annual report that was first published and launched in 2002 by the World Bank Group to analyze regulations that apply to an economy’s businesses during their life cycle, including start-up and operations, trading across borders, paying taxes, and resolving insolvency. The aggregate ease of doing business rankings are based on the distance to frontier scores for 10 topics and cover 189 economies.

The Doing Business findings have stimulated policy debates worldwide and enabled a growing body of research on how firm-level regulation relates to economic outcomes across economies. The key goal of Doing Business is to provide an objective basis for understanding and improving the local regulatory environment for business around the world.

By gathering and analyzing comprehensive quantitative data to compare business regulation environments across economies and over time, Doing Business encourages economies to compete towards more efficient regulation and offers measurable benchmarks for reform.

EDBI Conference

The “Ease of Doing Business Initiative” (EDBI), is grounded in the interest and need expressed by several Africa countries to learn and share information and experiences about the reforms implemented in the scope of Doing Business.

It was therefore imperative to host an Annual Conference in order to concretize these objectives, in which knowledge and experiences from various countries are presented, promoting regional collaboration in reforms based on “peer-to-peer learning”.

In August 2010, the World Bank Group, in collaboration with the Regional Multidisciplinary Centre of Excellence (RMCE) and some Governments, designed the EDBI, which has been gradually refined over the years. Mauritius, the top-ranked DB country in the Africa region for three years running, offered to host the event and to share its experience.

Following the successful pilot of this peer-to-peer learning model held in Mauritius in 2010, Rwanda, the country which improved the most in the ease of doing business in 2009/2010, hosted a second peer-to-peer workshop for Governments in Eastern and Southern Africa in March 2011. The third meeting was held in March 2012 in Gaborone, Botswana, the 2013 meeting was in Sandton, South Africa, the 2014 meeting took place in Maputo, Mozambique and the last meeting was held in Kampala, Uganda in 2015.