Kenya’s attractiveness to investors improved 19 places, the World Bank has said in it's latest ranking on the ease of doing business.
The rankings show Kenya advanced to position 61 out of 190 economies from 80 in 2017.
According to the doing business report 2018, the improvement has been attributed to efforts by the government to make registration of property easier by introducing an online system to pay fees and obtain digital certificates.
" As a result, the time for a business to register a property transfer has now been reduced to 49 days, from 61 days," the report states.
Also attributed to the improvement is the ease in accessing credit a section that advanced to a global rank of eight from 29 last year. The regional average rank is 115 in getting credit.
Other strengths for Kenya reviewed by World bank include strengthening requirements regulations for minority investors, Increasing shareholder rights and calls for greater corporate transparency.
However, the report shows that Kenya continues to underperform in several areas such as construction permitting where it takes slightly over five months to obtain all permits and authorizations to build a warehouse compared with Sub-saharan Africa regional average of 146 days.
It takes 91 days in Niger and 113 days in Rwanda to achieve the same. Due to this, Kenya was ranked at position 128 in areas of dealing with construction permits.
Starting a business in the country was also pointed out as a ponderous area for Kenya where it costs 25 per cent of the I'm come per capita to start a business.
This is 10 times more expensive than Cote d'Ivoire and the process takes 23 days and four days in Rwanda