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TIC wins top world award
2007-03-22 09:02:03
By Patrick Kisembo
The Tanzania Investment Centre has been named as the world`s best Investment Promotion Agency (IPA) of the year 2007.
TIC received the honour from the World Association of Investment Promotion Agencies (WAIPA) during a waipa World Investment Conference that took place recently in Geneva, Switzerland.
WAIPA is under the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
Speaking yesterday at a short ceremony held in Dar es Salaam to celebrate the award, TIC Executive Director Emmanuel Ole Naiko said more than 200 WAIPA members had competed for the award.
About 206 IPAs were evaluated by UNCTAD this year in the category of provision of aftercare services to investors.
Ole Naiko said the theme of the conference was ‘The New Sources of FDI: Emerging Economies on the Rise.`
He said although there were many entries, WAIPA had selected only three members for the first position of the best IPA.
The best three are TIC of Tanzania; Invest in Portugal of Portugal and Korea Trade-IPA of South Korea.
Ole Naiko said TIC was selected due to its effectiveness in its one-stop-shop
facilitative services, successful international and local investors’ roundtable meetings with the President, which are organised by the Tanzania National Business Council and National Investment Steering Committee, which deals with investment of cross cutting nature chaired by the Prime Minister.
It registered 679 projects in 2006 as compared to 550 projects in 2005. It also provided services to 11,229 investors as compared to 8,948 in 2005.
The TIC chief said Korea Trade was selected due to its successful Investment Doctor style and Invest in Portugal was selected for its well organised network system of reaching investors through the internet.
According to World Investment Report 2006, Tanzania took position number 11 in attracting foreign investors in Africa, next to South Africa and Egypt.
Tanzania went up 11 points last year 2005/2006 in economic growth, according to the World Economic Forum.
Ole Naiko said UNIDO 2006 reported TIC as the best IPA in Africa -South of Sub Sahara while the World Bank Doing Business report 2006/2007 recorded Tanzania among top 10 reformers in the world.
The Chief Secretary, Philemon Luhanjo, who received the award on behalf of the government, said it was encouraging to learn that present investors had decided to continue investing more in the country due to good services TIC had been offering.
``Investors continue to invest because of the good services you offer. In particular, you assist them in solving problems they face in the course of investing,`` said the Chief Secretary.
He said by receiving the award, TIC had attracted war from other IPAs that did not have the opportunity to win.
``Other IPAs have started to improve their investment environment and services for them to win the award next year,`` he said.
TIC is a member of WAIPA, which until March 2007 had more than 200 members.
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