Kenya has accelerated business reform agenda, implementing five key reforms in the past year to improve the business climate for small and medium-sized businesses, the World Bank said in a report launched on Wednesday.

The lender's Doing Business 2019: Training for Reform report says the reforms earned Kenya a spot among the global top improvers, a merit it has earned four times in the past 11 years.

"While this is a great accomplishment which we must celebrate, I also encourage the government to persist in its efforts to address the remaining hurdles that affect the establishment and growth of SMEs in the country, a segment that is critical to the creation of more jobs and opportunities for Kenyan youth," Felipe Jaramillo, World Bank Country Director in Kenya said during the launch of the report in Nairobi.

The World Bank report said Kenya has advanced this year to 61 in the global ease of doing business ranking, from a rank of 80 last year.

The report is issued annually, benchmarking 190 countries globally against ten indicators on how easy it is to do business.

A high ranking on the Ease of Doing Business Index means the regulatory environment is more conducive to start and operate a local business.

The report indicates that some of the reforms conducted by Kenya in the past year included making registering 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," says the survey.

The findings show that Kenya strengthened access to credit by introducing a new law on secured transactions that created a unified secured transactions legal framework.

The assessment also indicates that the country established a new unified and notice-based collateral registry.