The Ease of Doing Business Initiative (EDBI) is helping turn sub-Saharan Africa’s markets into attractive investment destinations.

Over the past 15 years, Sub-Saharan African countries have been on a tremendous journey to reform their business environments.

The results speak for themselves: In the “Doing Business” 2016 report, Sub-Saharan Africa recorded about 30 percent of the reforms that were implemented worldwide, and the region boasted half of the world’s top 10 improvers – making it the best-reforming region worldwide. As one example of what those trends mean: It takes four days to register a company in Kenya today, as compared to 54 days as recently as 10 years ago. In Rwanda, it takes an entrepreneur 32 days to transfer property – less time than it takes in Germany – compared to the 370 days that were required 10 years ago.

Despite the encouraging improvements, however, most Sub-Saharan African countries rank in the lower tier of the Doing Business measurements. Beyond the data about business conditions, it takes an average of 130 days for a business in the region to get a new electricity connection – yet, even after that business has such a connection, it experiences frequent power outages. The outages consume almost 700 hours per year – the highest such figure in the world.

We know that good practices, which are being implemented in the region, can help address such problems. The great challenge is to share that knowledge of good practices across reforming countries.

The EDBI is a peer-to-peer learning event that was requested by African countries that hope to facilitate knowledge-sharing about Doing Business reforms. For three days last month, Kenya hosted this year’s conference, whose theme focused on leveraging ICT to improve governments’ service to businesses – and ultimately to each country’s citizens. That theme seemed fitting for Kenya, which is a global success story on seamlessly integrating technology in citizens’ lives. Kenya, as you may recall, is the country that invented MPESA, the unique mobile-money payment system, and that is now rolling out “eCitizen,” the online government service portal.