14 Mar 2016

The government is working on expanding the Botswana Examinations Council’s (BEC) mandate to make it a national assessment centre.

This was disclosed by the chief executive officer of Botswana Qualifications Authority (BQA), Mr Abel Modungwa at a student leadership workshop hosted by BQA and the National Student Representative Council (NSRC) on Friday March 11. 

Mr Modungwa said the envisaged reforms would improve the quality of education and training and facilitate dialogue between the industry and training providers.

“The overall objective is to produce graduates that are job ready, can self–employ and are globally competitive. The system will be comparable and compatible to international standards,” he said.

He said the authority aspired to be a high performance organisation that operates effectively and efficiently for the satisfaction of all its customers.  Mr Modungwa said BQA would need the support of students as key stakeholders.

“May I encourage you all to support in developing a robust quality assurance system that will improve the education system of this country. Botswana like most countries has issues of unemployment, job-skills mismatch, low productivity, limited access and equity, poor work ethics mainly because our curriculum is lacking on soft skills. It is high time though that as a country, we pride ourselves with the quality of our human resource by developing and implementing robust learning programmes,” he said.

The objectives of the workshop were to educate stakeholders on the roles and responsibilities of the BQA mandate and the NSRC’s structures, roles and responsibilities. It was also meant to establish a working relationship between BQA and the NSRC to ensure learner protection. 

The NSRC secretary general, Mr Blessing Lechane presented on the roles and responsibilities of student representative council’s and the NSRC’s structure. Dr Phetolo Malau-Modiega explained the BQA mandate while Dr Andrew Molwane presented the learner protection policy. Ends