With the goal of making Cape Town the easiest place to conduct business in Africa, Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has unveiled the City’s new Ease of Doing Business Index. The index will keep track of ten essential metrics for ‘business friendliness’, with a particular emphasis on promoting increased infrastructure spending and economic development in Cape Town.
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The ultimate goal is to increase employment in Cape Town by fostering an environment that is conducive to business. The mayor, City Manager Lungelo Mbandazayo and Alderman James Vos, a member of the mayoral committee for economic growth, presented the new index on Tuesday at City Hall. This follows a city-wide survey of businesses and engagements with various industry bodies. Feedback from the private sector informs the indicators that the City will track to improve its business-facing services.
Cape Town’s index also builds on the results of the 2018 Sub-National Doing Business (SNDB) Survey from the World Bank, which rated Cape Town as the best municipality in the nation for issuing building permits and electricity.
The City now aims to reduce the time, costs and complexity of processes across ten critical indicators for ‘ease of doing business’, including building plan approvals, getting land use rights, rates clearance certificates and informal trading permits.
‘We aim to make it much easier for businesses to start up, invest and expand in Cape Town, with a plan to not only be the easiest place to do business in South Africa, but in Africa overall,’ Hill-Lewis explained. ‘When businesses thrive, more jobs are created, helping more people out of poverty over time. We are encouraged by our city consistently having the lowest unemployment rate of metros, but so much more still needs to be done to enable job-creating economic growth.’
‘We especially want to see faster, simpler and more cost-effective development approval processes to drive economic growth and job creation. That’s why much of Cape Town’s new Ease of Doing Business Index focuses on enabling infrastructure investment, from building plan approvals to connecting with the water and electricity network. We are on a journey of culture change in the City to make our government much more efficient, responsive and digitally accessible’
Vos stated that the City plans to use this new index to hold itself accountable to the public, with all progress being visible in real-time through an online dashboard that can be accessed at www.investcapetown.com.
‘We know that for businesses, time is money. My hope is that these measures will push the City to be quicker and more capable so that Capetonians can simply get on with the business of business,’ he added.
A bespoke governance structure will track progress across the ten indicators under the Mayoral Priority Programme for Ease of Doing Business.
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Picture: @geordinhl / Twitter