Sello Motseta
10th December 2019
The low capacity utilization rates especially for youth, limited access to finance, lack of industry skills and the local mismatch of jobs available and individuals seeking employment opportunities continue to frustrate private sector efforts to bolster the economy.
The Deputy Executive Director of the International Trade Centre(ITC) therefore underscored Botswana’s need to strengthen the private sector to generate jobs and diversify the economy to become a knowledge based high income country in the decades to come.
“The window of opportunity provided by the signing of the African Continental Free Trade Area will kick start a whole new epoch of trade flows in value added goods across the continent,” said Dorothy Tembo, Deputy Executive Director of the International Trade Centre(ITC).
She said, “Botswana is well positioned to capture a share of the service export market thanks to its strong service sector firms and stable governance structures. Interventions to improve information and communications technology infrastructure and e-commerce skills, could deliver dividends for service exports.”
Tembo maintained countries with well educated, skilled English speaking young people are well placed to tap into these markets. She advocated for the establishment of a youth employment strategy to identify bottlenecks, crafts solutions and catalyze job creation.
With a quarter of the population under 25 years of age and one of the highest rates of youth entrepreneurship in the world, Botswana has a significant demographic dividend ahead. However, there is a need for it to redouble its efforts to create jobs for the 37% of young people currently unemployed.
The SME competitiveness survey builds on more than 50 years of on the grounds experience to provide a nuanced picture of the capacity of a country’s private sector in 38 countries were surveyed.
It interviewed 616 Botswana firms for 2019 to obtain concrete empirical evidence on the needs of the country’s businesses to drive evidence based competitiveness policy and programme.
This project is a result of the strategic partnership that the Local enterprise Authority(LEA) and the International Trade Centre entered into in 2018. It assesses the level of SME competitiveness in Botswana and secondly performs an SME needs assessment LEA will use internally.
“Government is fully committed to developing SMME’s as demonstrated by the different policies and strategies as well as institutions that have been established to support SME’s,” said Socraat Gare, Acting Minister of Investment, Trade and Investment.
He said, “During the July 2019 Parliamentary sitting, Government approved the National Entrepreneurship Policy to focus on the development of exercise.”
This was considered significant because the current study aims to promote SME competitiveness in Botswana by taking a bottom-up approach to economic diversification and looked at parameters of competitiveness scores, sectoral deep dive, regional analysis, comparison to other countries, needs assessment and engagement with business support organizations.
“Going forward we would like to look at measurements on national indicators measuring GDP contribution by SME’s, export revenue, employment creation(including sectoral employment) and import substitution. To attain these measures, we would need to create a baseline data which is currently not available,” said Dr Racious Moatshe, Chief Executive Officer(CEO) of the Local Enterprise Authority(LEA).
He said, “The partnership must certainly continue to cover other critical areas of capacity development, youth strategy, women entrepreneurship, trade facilitation and export readiness amongst others.”
