20 Jun 2017

Institute of Development Management has taken a turn to reposition itself to respond to the human resource development needs in the region through research.

The institution has recently collaborated with Ohio University in the United States of America in areas of research. The IDM country director, Dr Onalenna Seitio-Kgokgwe disclosed this on Friday during a stakeholder engagement forum.

She said the institution, which was established in 1974, has key satellite offices in Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. To date it has enrolled about 2 000 students in Gaborone Campus and Francistown which caters for the working class with a provision of day classes.

She noted that the focus of the institution’s strategy was to reposition IDM to respond to the human resource capital needs in each of the aforementioned countries by aligning its services to national agendas of each country.

The institution, she said, envisaged to ultimately address the human resource needs in the SADC region.

She noted that the collaboration with Ohio University would strengthen capacity and quality output in areas of research.

The research, she said, would be primarily community-based, where students would do high impact research engagements at grassroots level.

Dr Seitio-Kgokgwe further said IDM intended to work on Culture and Heritage Studies with Ohio University based in Swaziland.

For her part, Professor Gillian Ice, a director at Ohio University said the partnership had a two way benefit for IDM and Ohio, where students would publish collaborative research at an international level.

She noted that Ohio University valued partnerships and they intend to develop programmes collectively to benefit the students. She said apart from working with IDM, Ohio had been working with various sectors in Botswana for the past 40 years.

Among other projects, she said, the university had in the past worked with the then Ministry of Education and Skills Development, where they participated in development of the teacher training programme.

Further, she said while they were interested in building community based research, their interest was also in doing research on Non-Communicable diseases, which necessitated the partnership with IDM. BOPA