Laura Noella Rwiliriza
Africa-Press – Rwanda. The renewed attention on the One Stop Center should not be read as institutional failure, but as an opportunity for deliberate reflection and course correction.
The initiative has long been anchored in a legitimate national objective: improving efficiency, coordination, and accessibility in public service delivery, particularly for the private sector.
Recent feedback from entrepreneurs and investors should therefore be understood not as dissent, but as constructive signals within a reform cycle that is still maturing.
During her tenure as RDB CEO, Clare Akamanzi raised concerns around structural, operational, and coordination bottlenecks embedded in the One Stop Center model. These observations were not critiques of vision or intent. Rather, they reflected a realistic assessment of institutional readiness. The timelines and expectations attached to the model often exceeded the maturity of the systems meant to support it. As is common with ambitious reforms, aspiration advanced faster than full consolidation.
It is important to situate the One Stop Center within its original context. At inception, the model functioned as a strategic business-facing signal—a means of demonstrating government’s commitment to reform, efficiency, and investor facilitation. In this respect, it served an important confidence-building role. Over time, however, gaps emerged between aspiration and operational depth, particularly in training, system integration, and inter-agency coordination. These are not unusual challenges in cross-cutting public sector reforms, but they do require honest recalibration.
To ground this discussion beyond abstraction, it is worth briefly narrating a specific experience. Recently, I registered a business with a foreign partner, following all documented and prescribed protocols within Rwanda’s widely promoted ease-of-doing-business framework. While the registration was ultimately successful, the process itself was fragmented: a prolonged sequence of phone calls, unclear handoffs, and eventual reliance on an intermediary agent who temporarily held sensitive documentation. The outcome was achieved, but not through a smooth, centralised system. It worked through informal adaptation rather than formal design.
This experience does not negate the policy objective; it illustrates the operational gap.
When systems rely on intermediaries and workarounds to function, efficiency becomes uneven and accountability diffuse. Over time, such patterns risk undermining trust, even when final results are delivered.
A critical contributor to this gap is capacity and training. Frontline officers are often expected to execute complex, cross-cutting mandates without consistent exposure to updated procedures, interoperable systems, or shared performance standards across institutions. Training has tended to be episodic rather than continuous, and institution-specific rather than ecosystem-oriented. As a result, staff frequently rely on informal knowledge, personal networks, or improvised solutions to move processes forward. While this reflects commitment and ingenuity, it also underscores the need for structured, sustained capacity building that aligns people, processes, and systems around a common service-delivery logic.
This gap should not be interpreted as reform failure, but as a caution against overextension.
The One Stop Center was often positioned as a singular, seamless solution, despite depending on multiple autonomous institutions governed by distinct legal mandates, regulatory frameworks, and operational cultures. Expecting full integration under these conditions was optimistic, and perhaps premature.
Current leadership has appropriately identified operational friction points. These include regulatory sequencing delays, unclear institutional handoffs, uneven capacity, and inconsistent service standards. At the same time, leadership transitions require space for institutional familiarisation, system mapping, and internal alignment. Durable reform is built through sequencing and consolidation, not immediacy.
At its core, the challenge is one of system efficiency and aggregation. The One Stop Center concept was introduced before the surrounding ecosystem—digital platforms, data-sharing protocols, regulatory workflows, and human capacity—was sufficiently interoperable. Today, however, conditions are evolving. Newer digital systems and governance mechanisms present an opportunity to aggregate services more coherently than was previously possible.
This moment therefore calls for reframing rather than abandonment. What currently exists is more accurately described as an Ease of Doing Business coordination framework, rather than a fully integrated single-point service. Clarifying this framing allows institutions to focus on achievable improvements: clearer mandates, stronger coordination mechanisms, targeted capacity building, and improved inter-agency accountability.
The way forward lies in refinement, collaboration, and alignment. Progress will depend on institutions working ensemble—across mandates, hierarchies, and generations—to build a system that reflects current capacity while steadily advancing toward deeper integration. Reform is not a single intervention, but a process of disciplined iteration.
In this context, reframing the One Stop Center is not a retreat from ambition. It is a demonstration of institutional maturity. Reflection, rather than reaction, is what enables public sector reforms to endure, adapt, and ultimately deliver on their promise.
Source: The New Times
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