He said the system would improve management and sharing of important information and would also facilitate business within the public as well as the private sector. Dube said Swaziland would work on this project alongside the Investor Roadmap 2012.
He was speaking during a workshop themed ‘Improving the business environment in Swaziland’. “It’s important for Swaziland to significantly improve its business and investment climate. The country has to create a new business conducive environment in order to attract and sustain both local and foreign direct investment (FDI). There is now an urgent need for creation of employment and for business development,” he said.
Dube said there were a number of factors which had been standing in the way of business development in Swaziland and these included outdated or cumbersome legislation and regulations as well as overlap and duplication in different institutions.
He said other factors were poor coordination and attitude when dealing with businesses and preparedness and role of each partner. Dube said there were also challenges in the allocation of resources towards employment creation, thus a framework was developed with special focus on the creation of jobs as well as economic growth.
He said an Investor Roadmap was also developed by SIPA and partners in 2005, reviewed in 2009 and further reviewed in 2012. “This instrument has been received very well by many and there is hope of making a difference. “Recent reports by the different implementing teams augur well for future good progress.
We have actually identified the legislations, as well as regulations, which present challenges to the establishment and development of businesses. “With the progress being made in the implementation of the Investor Roadmap, the various duplications and overlap among the different agencies shall be addressed and dealt with,” he said.
‘Govt e-regulations promote good governance’
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Business Facilitation Programme Coordinator Julien Bornon says e-regulations by governments help in promoting good governance by increasing the awareness of administrative rules and procedures.
He said as a result, conditions for balanced dialogue between the users of the public service and civil servants would be established. “The 'e-regulations' system, developed by UNCTAD, allows local governments to present administrative procedures online.
“For the time being, it is mainly used to present investment procedures but it can be applied to any administrative process.
The e-regulations system is about business facilitation, simplification of procedures, e-government. Procedures are detailed step by step from the user's point of view,” he said. Bornon said for each step, the system showed what was expected at the end of the step, who were the civil servants in charge, the forms and other documents required, the cost if any, the processing time, legal justification of the step and ways of complaints and recourse in case of disagreement. He said the information would be certified by the entities in charge of each step. Bornon said each country’s database was managed separately and could be updated online by the public offices in charge of each step.
Adding, he said the system was multilingual.
He said the e-regulations system was being implemented in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Mali, Morocco, Nicaragua, Viet Nam, Rwanda, Senegal, and Cameroon. Adding, he said all national systems could be seen online, although some of them were not public yet.
“The objective of the e-regulations system is four-fold: providing full transparency on rules and procedures by offering online detailed, practical and up-to-date descriptions of the steps they have to go through, seen from the users’ point of view. Making it easier for governments to simplify procedures by allowing easy identification of unnecessary steps,” he said.
Bornon said the system would help in promoting good governance by increasing the awareness of administrative rules and procedures. He said in the medium term, it would set a basis for regional/international harmonisation of rules by facilitating comparisons among countries.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Nomthandazo Nkambule
Quelle/Source: The Swazi Observer, 12.07.2012
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