BY Fidelity Mhlanga
The World Bank says Zimbabwe is not reforming fast enough to improve its ease-of-doing business.
Authorities in the southern African nation together with the World Bank are working on a reform agenda which seeks to improve transparency, efficiency and regulation.
According to the latest World Bank annual ratings, Zimbabwe was ranked 155 among 190 economies in the ease of doing business.
The ranking was an improvement from the 2017 position of 159.
“We are not reforming as fast as we would like. The target has been each year that we improve the doing business environment and get a better ranking. Certainly, we hope that as we move through the next couple of years we will move towards the double digit figure rather than a three digit figure, but there is no specific target there that we must be number this. We aim to improve our distance to frontier and get better,” World Bank country coach for Zimbabwe, Eric Zinyengere, told a progress review meeting on the doing business reform programme.
“We believe that the fact that the highest office in the country is concerned about the ease-of-doing business, policy inconsistencies should become a thing of the past. We have seen more laws enabled in a shortest time than before like the Insolvency Act, the Estate Administrators Act and the Deeds Registries Act. All these laws have been pending for quite a while, but for the past two years all have been passed which shows that there is a drive to improve the ease of doing business environment.”
Zinyengere said funding had in some way hampered progress on the ease-of-doing business reform agenda.
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“As we move towards reform, it requires financing. I think that was mentioned quite a few times that there is need for a significant funding for some of the reforms needed now. Hopefully that will be the case as we move forward after May 1,” he said.
“And if that funding is there things like new software and technologies for some of the different offices and so on, would allow them to achieve much bigger and more substantial reform.”
