16 Apr 2013

Permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MoESD), Ms Grace Muzila says proceeds from the mining sector are channeled to the development budget.

Officiating at the USA and West Indies Education Exploration Mission to Botswana, Ms Muzila said such an arrangement would allow continuity should the mines run dry as developments would stay for a longer time.

She noted that if the proceeds from mining were to be used for salaries, workers would go on strike during mining shutdown, adding that Botswana would not compete in the absence of proper infrastructural development.

 Botswana, as a relatively small country, could not do things alone and for this reason the involvement of USA and the West Indies became paramount as they had been doing well on the field of education, she said.

 She said ‘the goal of MoESD is to ensure that our education is globally competitive and is anchored on an appropriate policy and regulatory framework that has been benchmarked against the best in the world’.

 Ms Muzila further said the country had resolved all aspects pertaining to access to education at basic level and although the institutions in Botswana were still at an infant stage, the ministry was dealing with access to education at a tertiary level.

 “Our institutions are relatively young in terms of age, diversity of programmes and in quality provision,” she said, adding that the Education Hub was mandated to facilitate and support capacity of the institutions to help them grow and nurture them appropriately.

 Political and economic counselor at the United States Embassy, Ms Katherine Dueholm, commended Botswana for "appreciating education to the extreme" and placing a tremendous emphasis on educating its citizenry.

“Education is the pursuit of knowledge, it is an opportunity for us to inquire, to learn, to understand new things and education is also the opportunity to further understand our world,” she said.

 Ms Dueholm said education was about making connections and networking, bringing together facts that were shared among individuals for a better understanding of the world through connection between countries. She said the US Embassy was keenly interested in the ties that education could bring between the two countries and that the US Embassy encouraged studying abroad and other forms of exchange studies.

 Director of the Department of Europe and Americas in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MOFAIC), Ms Tshenolo Modise, said education formed a foundation of development and sustainability of any nation leading this country to partner with other countries to enhance its education.

 She said way back in 1966, Botswana had no credible system of delivering knowledge to learners, but today, the country boasted of significant strides with a literacy rate of over 80 per cent that had been achieved with the assistance of friends such as the United States and the West Indies.

 Ms Modise said this mission was yet another demonstration of the role that the the USA and the West Indies continue to play in the development of Botswana. ENDS