Villagers in Ruziba say the old government Health Centre was “precarious.” Photographs of it suggest stronger adjectives, such as ramshackle, tumbledown or dilapidated. The new Health Centre is far from precarious. It is smart, solid and a source of local pride. And it was built on the foundations of a revolution sweeping Burundi – tax payments. “It was built with our tax returns,” says Dr Bellejoie Louise Iriwacu. “I am very, very proud of it.” The Rubiza Health centre, and dozens like it, was funded by a streamlined tax-gathering system adopted by the government to maximize revenue in an economy that sits near the bottom of the world’s least-developed. When she qualified as a doctor a year ago and got hired by the government, one of her first acts was to go to the Office Burundais de Recettes (OBR) – the country’s tax-collection authority – to register to pay tax on her modest salary. OBR was created in 2009 with assistance from the British government’s DFID aid wing and then through an organization called TradeMark Africa (TMA), which is helping East African Community (EAC) states modernize and integrate their economic infrastructure. The EAC groups Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi and is home to 160 million people. Some young workers might have baulked at making a system to deduct tax from their salary a priority as they began a new life and a new career. Not Dr. Iriwacu. “Not paying taxes means no money to make the country live, to...

It used to be six or seven trips, eight days traipsing around town and a lot of shoe leather in the clammy lakeside capital of Burundi to complete the paperwork needed to register for a building permit. Now it’s one trip, six flights up in a Finance Ministry building by elevator and a mere 24 hours or less. That’s because of a One-Stop Shop approach Burundi has adopted, an innovation that has made the country of nine million people one of the top 10 economic reformers in the world, according to the World Bank. The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) paid tribute to Burundi’s zeal in its annual Doing Business in East Africa report, which made the country the only African state to figure in the league of the world’s top 10 economic reformers. “Burundi is among the top 10 improvers for the second consecutive year, with four regulatory reforms in starting a business, in dealing with construction permits, registering property and trading across borders,” said the IFC report. Only four steps are required to register a business, half the number needed on average by the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. They include submitting all documents, obtaining a registration certificate and registering the company. It also includes making a company seal needed by some banks to issue loans. Although the Government is now proposing to abolish this step, combining the first two so as to remain with only two steps. "The One-Stop Shops are important for Burundi's economy and economic...

They are as much a feature of Africa’s borders as immigration officials, barbed wire and bureaucracy. They are the service stations of Africa’s highways and the pit stops of commerce from Cape Town to Cairo. They gravitate to the frontiers where trucks stop, truckers break and travelers take on food and water for their journeys. Their shop fronts are brimming baskets and their cash registers are pockets and purses. They are the women traders who make a living by selling wares at Africa’s myriad borders and TradeMark Africa (TMA) is helping them to get organized, to know their rights and to reap the fruits of East African (EA) integration. “As cross border traders we carry the ignition key to transform our communities,” said Hadijja Sserwanga, a champion of the rights of Uganda’s border traders, regional Chairperson of the East African Women Cross Borders Traders Association (EAWCBTA). She describes herself as a politician, activist, teacher and community development worker fighting to overturn the sexual harassment, exploitation and marginalization by the (largely male) people who run and operate EA borders. She’s been a border trader herself since 1987, operating on the Uganda-Tanzania frontier at Mutukula, and has seen and experienced the problems women traders run into by not knowing their rights under EA integration or being bamboozled into paying unnecessary fines, taxes and bribes because they don’t know better. “I have a lot of passion for women’s empowerment and being a cross border trader. I feel we can transform ourselves from being...

Nairobi – After 10 years of stop-go discussions, three East African states are on the verge of launching a single tourist visa to ease the path of visitors across national borders and make it easier for the tourism industry to offer multi-destination packages. “It’s taken a while. There were concerns about how to split the revenue, about possibly losing money and about screening visitors, but Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya have seen that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages,” said Waturi Matu, coordinator (Kenya) of the East African Tourism Platform. Moves to facilitate tourists across East African Community borders was given fresh impetus in June when the presidents of Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda met and agreed to strengthen integration and cooperation to spur the growth of trade. “Rwanda will be in charge of designing the visa, and the plan is to have it launched in January next year with Tanzania and Burundi free to join at any time,” she said. Long a lobbying goal of East Africa’s tourism industry, the single visa will enable a tourist to buy a visa for the three countries for $100 instead of three visas for $150. The savings for couples and couples with children, the main tourism unit, is therefore substantial. “Tourism is a key source of income for the East African Community and we support the East African Tourism Platform precisely so it can lobby to make the borders between members states ‘thinner’ and less bureaucratic,” said Frank Matsaert, CEO of TradeMark Africa. The...

They sneak across the border back to Burundi, putting one foot quietly in front of the other on unmarked forest trails and secret tracks. The enemy is the authority. The goal is tax evasion. And the reason is ignorance. These are the women traders of Burundi who risk the wrath of the law to escape paying taxes on the food and small goods they carry in their nylon baskets from Uganda or Rwanda to sell to ready customers in border villages and further afield. It is much the same story across much the East African Community (EAC) – women traders running needless risks because of rumour and misinformation about punitive border taxes, expensive permits and baffling bureaucracy. “Women traders are the ones who face, every day, the problems of not knowing what their rights are in today’s EAC,” said Burundi’s minister for East African Community Affairs Hafsa Mossi. “Most of them haven’t a clue about their rights or their obligations.” With support from TradeMark Africa (TMA) that situation is changing. Partnering with NGOs, the government and the media, the borderline informal sector is learning that much of what they feared held no threat, and that clarity on tax obligations and paperwork can make their lives, and their profits much better. “Women traders are at the front line in disputes with the authorities at the borders,” said Floride Ahintungiye, Programme Director of the International NGO Search for Common Ground (SFCG). “With help from TradeMark Africa (TMA) our staff went to the...

Trader Jeremie Kayobera had his life changed by a radio broadcast. It wasn’t a religious broadcast, or a political one, but a nuts and bolts broadcast about how to take advantage of Burundi’s membership of the East African Community (EAC). Until that December 2011 radio show, he had bought maize flour in Tanzania or Uganda, Burundi’s economically powerful neighbours, imported it, paid his border dues and sold the staple foodstuff in his home country. Why not? It’s a pattern of business repeated across the whole spectrum of Burundi’s trade relationships with its EAC neigbours: buy across the frontier, import, and sell. Every market place in even the smallest community bears witness to this pattern of doing business. That changed overnight. He heard a radio programme explain to him that he could take advantage of start-up help from the government’s API Investment agency; he heard how much or how little he would have to pay in tax to the state’s Office Burundais des Recettes (OBR), the revenue authority. Today he has realized a dream and established his own maize mill in Kanyanza. Goodbye paying taxes on imported foodstuffs. Hello the opportunity to make bigger profits milling from local produce, and to export. “It doesn’t matter where you go in the countryside, you find that people know almost nothing about the benefits of EAC membership or the steps the government is taking to help business compete in the EAC,” says Davy Rubangisha, Programme Manager at the RPA radio, Burundi’s private and biggest...

An English revolution is sweeping across Burundi, transforming this French-speaking nation to a multi-lingual nation. The demand for the language has resulted in several English language colleges sprouting up all over the capital city. While the EAC Treaty provides English and Kiswahili as the official languages in the Community, the bigger majority of the Burundian population, including Government officials lack the requisite skills to conduct business and meetings in English. This situation has resulted in significant challenges for the Burundi population in relation to the rest EAC partner states, including difficulties in common understanding and in-depth negotiations during EAC council and sectorial meetings follow up on agreed decisions or coordination of Burundi’s EAC policy implementation. On 1st July 2007, Burundi officially acceded as a member state of the East African Community (EAC) and committed itself to a widening and deepening co-operation with Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda in the political, economic, social, and cultural fields. Today, the EAC has become the fastest growing block in Sub-Saharan Africa. Through the establishment of a Customs Union, Common Market, Monetary Union and ultimately a Political Federation, Burundi, with the other four partner states is set for increased trade and development. One of the major challenges for Burundi has been that it is the only EAC country with the predominance of the French language. Since 2012, TradeMark Africa (TMA) has been supporting the Ministry at the Presidency in Charge of the East African Community Affairs,to establish and implement a two year project titled ‘Enhancing...

KOBERO, Burundi – Burundi, one of the world’s poorest states, has been ranked one of the world’s top 10 economic reformers in a World Bank survey that honours its drive to modernize trade and infrastructure. The award, in the bank’s yearly Ease of Doing Business report, acknowledges Burundi’s efforts to attract foreign investment by unraveling age-old procedures that snarled commerce in paperwork, queues and wasted time. “We are delighted to be among the top reformers in the world, having moved up 13 places this year on top of having moved up eight places last year,” said the country’s Second Vice President, Gervais Rufyikiri. The index, topped by Singapore for the seventh successive year, measures how countries perform on a range of indicators from the time it takes to get a building permit to how long it takes to get across borders. Time, especially in the East African region is money, and Burundi’s modernization efforts have been helped by targeted expertise from TradeMark Africa (TMA), a donor-funded organisation helping the region to grow prosperity through smoother and increased trade. Modernity gleams through the rain at Kobero, a four-hour drive from Bujumbura and Burundi’s lifeline border crossing into Tanzania and the distant port of Dar es Salaam. Or, a two-day drive for the 80-odd trucks that pass here every day from Dar es Salaam. Here, in the middle of a fairly typical African frontier crossing – tiny kiosks, a foreign exchange dealer, and truckers’ cheap hotels – is a large white prefabricated...