18 Aug 2019

President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi has launched the Muzinda Hub Botswana initiative which will focus on equipping young Batswana with digital skills.

 “I am extremely delighted, not just at seeing you, and at looking at your eyes. I haven’t seen so much excitement and hope, all ballooned out into one. You are our tomorrow, we love you, we cherish you and we want the best for you because this is the Botswana that’s coming.

The very fact that you are pioneers in this programme, sets you apart from the rest,” said President Masisi at the launch on August 16.

Muzinda Hub Botswana, located at Botswana Innovation Hub (BIH), will give an opportunity to some 500 youth to train in among others Coding, entrepreneurship, and project designing in a fully-funded scholarship.

This follows a promise made with the founder and chairperson of Econet Group, Dr Strive Masiyiwa during the first Youth Entrepreneurship Fireside Chat and Town Hall, in April 2019.

President Masisi thanked Dr Masiyiwa and encouraged for further development of partnership initiatives like the one that resulted in the Muzinda Hub Botswana initiative.

Dr Masisi also noted that the McKenzie Group had produced a report, indicating that ‘so many people are training for and are in jobs that will not exist in the not so distant future and so many people who are in school are going to end up doing jobs that have never been imagined.”

For that reason, he said when doing its budget, next year, the government would consider favourably to develop a scholarship programme for jobs of the future, adding that the Muzinda Hub Botswana initiative was something close to his heart.

President Masisi said he felt privileged that after the government came up with the Maitlamo Policy, which was Botswana’s National Information and Communications Policy approved by the National Assembly on August 2007, some of its contents were being implemented during his term in office, as the President of Botswana.

The Policy provides a clear and compelling roadmap that will drive social, economic, cultural and political transformation in the years ahead through the effective use of ICT.

In his welcome remarks, BIH CEO, Mr Alan Boshwaen thanked President Masisi for championing issues felt so passionately by the youth in Botswana.

He said Information and Communications Technology was one of the focus sectors underpinning BIH’s mandate as it was a key driver in the transformation of Botswana towards a digital economy and the creation of job opportunities.

 The digital skills and training programme, itself, Mr Boshwaen said was clearly aligned to BIH’s current strategic thrust which aimed to implement and scale several initiatives which were to serve as catalysts in the country’s digital transformation.

 “Other major BIH initiatives in this regard, include the implementation of a Crowd Sourcing Centre for digitization and Implementation of Top 1000 Digital Innovators programme.

 The initiative, he said entailed rapid training and up-skilling of unemployed youth on how to digitize content at the same time providing an opportunity to earn income.

To illustrate this by way of example, he said BIH had already partnered with the Department of Surveys and Mapping and a member company to digitally capture buildings and other structures on a map, in this case covering parts of the Central District.  “The intention is to scale the project to other regions and the youth involved will be compensated based on delivered and validated work. The same model can be applied across various sectors including the rapid conversion of documents or data into electronic format, creating significant new opportunities for more youth,” he added.

Through the second initiative, the BIH CEO said the innovation hub was enlisting the top 1000 digital innovators in the country, to be ranked according to their technical capabilities and completed projects.  These innovators, he said would be given opportunities in the form of challenges from both the public and private sectors to develop new digital services or digital businesses.

For her part, the president and founder of Dare to Dream Foundation, Captain Kgomotso Phatsima said Muzinda Hub Botswana initiative was committed to providing young Batswana with access to online globally competitive digital skills training.

She explained that earlier this year, Dare to Dream Foundation, the implementer of the Muzinda Hub Botswana initiative, collaborated with Special Economic Zones Authority of Botswana to attend the Global Aviation Investment Summit in Dubai.

“At the summit, we met with Airbus, a multinational European aircraft manufacturer. They came here to Botswana and partnered with us to train more than 1 500 learners in rural and urban areas, on Coding, one of the crucial skills for the new digital economy,” she said.

As it was promised, Captain Phatsima said 60 per cent of the 500 youth given the scholarship were female and would graduate in December 2019.

“This is our deliberate commitment to building a pull of digital talent. All the young people have been selected from different parts of the country and across different disciplines,” she added. ENDS