Afghan team in town to study investment climate

A six-member delegation from the Afghanistan Investment Climate Fund
(AICF), also known as Harakat, has visited Bangladesh with an aim to
learn from the local experiences of investment climate reforms here.
"As the Bangladesh Investment Climate Fund ( BICF) has effectively
been running programmes to support and improve the investment climate
of the country for the last two and a half years, we have come here
to learn from the experiences in Bangladesh," Suleman Fatimie, CEO
of Harakat, told The Daily Star. BICF is managed in partnership with
the UK Department for International Development ( DFID) and European
Commission. He said the delegation visited the Dhaka Export
Processing Zone (EPZ) and the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME)
Foundation. The team plans to meet several stakeholders to gain
insight from them. "Bangladesh has so far been doing a brilliant job
in improving the investment climate. We are impressed by the
e-registration system for businesses, which we hope to replicate in
our country," said Fatimie at a meeting. Harakat, an Afghan word that
stands for movement forward, was established in 2008 and run by an
Afghan board of prominent business people. The organisation is
working to encourage more private sector investment and to
reconstruct the war-hit country for the last three decades. "Harakat
aims to ease business in Afghanistan, support investment and achieve
economic growth. So we want to learn from countries like Bangladesh
and then replicate the ideas in our own country," he said. "To
achieve this, we provide grant funds to the government for activities
that reduce the barriers to doing effective business in
Afghanistan," said Fatimie. "The most common barriers for Afghanistan
are issues like complicated government rules and procedures,
corruption, bureaucracy and insufficient skills." Currently, Harakat
has a fund of $50 million, provided by DFID, to finance projects
aimed at promoting the business environment throughout Afghanistan.
"We aim to build this into a $100 million fund by attracting
additional donor and private sector funding," added the Harakat
chief. Tamim Samee, a board member of Harakat, and Laura Watson,
programme manager of BICF, were also present.