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.