Nigeria recently moved up 24 places to 145 in the World Bank’s Doing Business report. This follows strategic reform initiatives put in place by the government to create an enabling environment to start and grow businesses in Nigeria.
The World Bank Doing Business project provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 190 economies worldwide.
Prof. ‘Yemi Osinbajo, the Vice President of Nigeria and Chairman of the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) expressed delight at the ranking while commending the efforts of stakeholders who supported the far-reaching reforms being implemented.
“I welcome Nigeria’s improved performance. We are one of the top ten reforming economies in the world in 2017,” Osinbajo said. “I commend all stakeholders who worked with us to achieve this significant result, particularly the National Assembly, Lagos and Kano State Governments, and the private sector.”
In his reaction, Dr. Okey Enelamah, the Honourable Minister of Industry, Trade, and Investment expressed his commitment to ensure even further improvements.
“This is simply an indication that we are headed in the right direction. We have identified the bottlenecks hampering the ease of doing business while doing everything necessary to remove them,” Enelamah said. “I have no doubt that the National Action Plan (NAP 2.0) which we launched recently will achieve its objective of further improving our ranking. Our ultimate aim, however, is to get positive testimonials from owners of businesses across the country since they are a critical part of our stakeholder list.”
Since October 2016, the PEBEC has embarked upon a number of reform efforts including the concluded 60-day National Action Plan (NAP 60) which was a short term intervention targeted at accelerating specific reforms, the operationalization of the Executive Order on the Promotion of Transparency in the Business Environment (EO1); and the improvements of business processes, regulations for trading within Nigeria as well as a new subnational reforms project in collaboration with state governments.
While the initial NAP 60 had a 70 per cent performance rate, the final results of NAP 2.0 will be announced by the PEBEC in December.