01 Jul 2015

Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) vice president, Mr Jim Polan, says their institution is looking for viable business plans for funding.

In his presentation at an event hosted by the American Business Council Botswana (ABCB) recently, Mr Polan said their mission was to promote long term sustainable development, hence it was important that plans that would be submitted, make sense and also be able to pay the dept.

“OPIC is the United States (US) Government development Institution whose mission is to drive the investment into the countries that are open to it,” he said.

Mr Polan noted that most of their outstanding funds were with investment finance, political risk insurance products and support investment funds.

“Some of the industries that OPIC supports are infrastructure, water, energy, micro finance, franchising as well as small medium enterprise. 

OPIC also provides financial products for eligible companies to borrow money from OPIC and to provide various kinds of Insurance,” he said.

On the existence of the ABCB, its chairperson, Mr Vkash Ponangi, said they were a non-profit association that was founded in Botswana in 1994. 

Mr Ponangi said their aim was to foster investment and strengthen commercial ties between the United States and Botswana, citing the OPIC presentation as just the latest example of their efforts.

The US Ambassador to Botswana, Mr Earl Miller said their embassy looked forward to working with Batswana through business matchmaking. 

Thus, Mr Miller urged aspiring business clients to proactively take advantage of the OPIC.

He said the embassy was also working to facilitate private sector partnerships to enable Batswana companies to develop competitive solar project bids with cutting edge technology.

Again, he noted that it was exciting to see Botswana moving towards including independent power producer operations and solar projects in its power generation mix. 

He added that the country had tremendous energy potential and harnessing renewable and coal resources will further economic diversification.

“To support the government of Botswana in this regard, the US Embassy has worked with the US non-profit initiative for global development, a power Africa member to streamline and standardise bankable power purchase agreements. 

The initiative for Global Development formally extended this offer of assistance to the Botswana government on June 16 this year, he said. ENDS