23 Aug 2018

 The heads of Botswana diplomatic missions have been urged to assist the country’s efforts of diversifying the economy by promoting the various economic sectors to the international community.

Speaking during 2018 Heads of Diplomatic Missions Consultative Forum held in Gaborone on August 22, Mr Uttum Corea, the director general in the National Strategy Office (NSO), said exposing the country’s economic sector to the world would assist the country’s goods to gain greater access to the world markets.

“The country needs to promote the areas of the economy where Botswana holds a comparative advantage to the outside world,” he said.

He told the country’s high commissioners and ambassadors that the NSO was coordinating efforts to diversify Botswana’s economy through the cluster development model, with cluster core teams having been convened and

having been to benchmarking exercises to different parts of the world.

“The benchmarking excursions have been used for strategic analysis with the view of identifying areas of improvement in the cluster focus areas of Financial and Knowledge Intensive Services (FKIBS), Beef and Tourism,” Mr Corea said.

Speaking on behalf of the FKIBS cluster, Ms Nomakhosi Mookodi, a Business Analyst at the Botswana Investment and Trade Centre (BITC) said during their benchmarking trip to Chile they learnt a lot about how the country was working on diversifying its economy from being mineral commodity-based to other sectors including financial services.

She added that they had studied the operations of Chilean based company Evaluserve, a company with Indian origins that had taken advantage of Chile’s investment climate, which includes the Chilean government promoting cluster development.

Evaluserve provides Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) services, and Ms Mookodi said they took advantage of Chile’s corresponding time zone with the East Coast of the United States to provide services there.

She said Botswana being an English speaking country with corresponding time zone with many European countries, should also consider targeting companies that could provide similar services to Europe operating from Botswana.

On behalf of the Tourism cluster, the Chief Tourism Officer in the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism Ms Temalo Lesetlhe said they had studied future trends for the tourist sector.

“Tourists want to go to areas which are not common, and we know that a younger generation millennial tourists have a different taste to the older generation of baby boomers. Generational changes imply different ways of doing business, and we want to increase our presence in this new market while maintaining our ‘low volume, high value’ approach to tourism,” Ms Lesetlhe said.

She said they had recognised various areas for improvement, including specialised marketing, product development, and development of local suppliers, skills development and public coordination.

“There is a need for a synchronised marketing approach. We went for benchmarking in Iceland and realised that they market their tourism through a coordinated marketing that involves the foreign affairs ministry and its diplomatic offices, local municipalities and other sectors. Singapore, meanwhile identifies niche markets to promote their tourism to,” Ms Lesetlhe said.

Mr Brian Dioka of the Botswana Meat Commission, who presented on behalf of the Beef Cluster said efforts needed to be stepped up to promote Botswana beef as a natural meat coming from organically raised grass-fed cattle as opposed to feed-lot fed commercially developed cattle.

He said they were developing a ‘Kgomokhumo’ beef cluster in the south of the country, where 1.17 million of Botswana’s 2.07 million herds of cattle was located, and where there was an existing beef and meat processing industry and good transportation system to access export markets.

Mr Dioka said European Union (EU) was the main consumer of Botswana’s beef by value, but countries such as Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Australia had a larger share of the EU beef market. ENDS