26 May 2016

Botswana’s ability to address unemployment and stimulate job creation relies on stakeholders input, One Source Consulting partner, Dr Mpho Pheko has said.

Speaking during the release of 2015 Jobs Summit Report done in partnership with The Human Resource Development Council (HRDC),  Dr Pheko said measures to address unemployment required concerted efforts from all thereby emphasising the need to create a national rallying point.

“Accordingly, as a country, we need to address the problems that prevail now, so that they do not follow us into the future,” she said.

She thus called for all interested parties, organisations and individuals to make proposals indicating how they wished to be part of the Botswana Job Summit in 2016.

She said One Source maintained that high unemployment rates presented economic and political risks for the country, as it could translate into other social political and economic problems.

On the objectives of the 2015 summit, she said the idea was to bring together efforts of various stakeholders in a strategic and cohesive way, to generate practical interventions that would assist the country to design implementable strategies that enabled job expansion and job enhancement.

“The summit also intended to establish a diverse group of professionals who will be tasked with interrogating and supporting job creation efforts in the long term, a platform that now exist as the Botswana Jobs Summit Task Team,” she said.

Meanwhile, Dr Pheko said preparations had commenced for the 2016 Annual Botswana Job Summit, which was to be held under the theme: Maximising job creation through effective policy and strategy implementation.

She said the 2nd summit will be influenced by the inaugural summit 2015 deliberations, which emphasised the need for existence of sound policies, strategies and programmes in Botswana, but highlighted the challenges relating to implementation.

HRDC chief, Dr Patrick Molutsi said the report took long from October 2015 to be released as they spent a lot of time taking into consideration what was discussed. “When we introduced the idea of the Jobs summit, we made it clear that we wanted to produce practical solutions and relevant advice of job creation to the private sector, government and individuals of this country, not just a document which will be later shelved,” he said.

Mr Molutsi noted that in the report they have recommended that each and every producer of graduates, must undertake a tracer study that will enable them to know whether their graduates have been employment or not.

Appended to the report is a separate recommendations table presenting 15 distilled recommendations from the 2015 Jobs Summit.

The also report presents background of the jobs challenge as well as summaries of outcomes and recommendations from each session. ENDS