By HELEN ZULU –
THE Business Regulatory Review Agency (BRRA) is working on streamlining processes for business registration to cut on duplication of requirements and reduce the cost of doing business.
BRRA director and chief executive officer Sharon Sichilongo said the agency was coordinating a programme dubbed “One Stop Shop Integration system which allowed regulators to share information when registering a business.
The one-stop-shop integration system aims at streamlining bureaucratic procedures and requirements faced by entrepreneurs at business start-up stages.
Ms Sichilongo said the system was a strategy aimed at providing both local and foreign investors with efficient and business-friendly registration and compliance services, thus reducing the cost of doing business.
She was speaking in an interview at the just-ended agriculture and commercial show in Lusaka.
“What this integration system does is that once a business registers with for example, the Patents and Companies Registration Agency (PACRA), all other participating agencies like Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA), National Pension Scheme Authority (NAPSA) among
other agencies will be able to pick up the information in no time,” she said.
Ms Sichilongo said that this would entail that there would be less paper being used in terms of printing out documents over and over again.
She said the agency was also looking at coming up with a single licensing system aimed at ensuring that there was harmonisation and streamlining of procedures in the business licensing process.
Ms Sichilongo said what the agency was looking for was a situation where businesses were able to obtain licenses from one regulatory portal to eliminate a lot of processes, use of hard copies and shorten the time in which a business had to take to get the necessary authorisation.
“The whole licensing framework requires a lot of work for us to operationalise this single licensing system, but we are giving it a sector by sector approach.
“We have started already with the tourism sector, what we have done is compile all the licences that are under this sector and then we are going to call a meeting for all the regulators in the sector …” she said.
