28 Aug 2019

Botswana Police Service deputy commissioner-crime investigations says women should also be allowed to have and enjoy the same benefits as their male counterparts.

Speaking at the BPS women’s day celebration held in collaboration with South African Police Service, in Gaborone on August 27, Mr David Mosetse thus encouraged women to be confident and stop limiting themselves.

“I call upon women to stand up and compete for what they deserve. When women joined the police service, we took a deliberate decision to release them from the mentality that captured them or preferring them on soft jobs within the BPS,” he said.

Currently, he said the ratio of men to women in Botswana Police Service was 1:3, ‘and that means around 29 per cent of the human resources in BPS are women.’

Deliberating on the theme; Let’s build a gender-balanced sphere, South African High Commissioner, Ms Rosemary Mashaba said since the advent of democracy in 1994, South Africa developed a legislative framework to enhance the socio-economic rights of women.

“Millions of women have entered the workforce for the first time, increasing the proportion of women wage earners in society. The employment equity policies increased the representation of women at all levels in both the public and private sector although more needs to be done in this area,” she said.

Ms Mashaba said women’s economic empowerment was a prerequisite for sustainable development.

“South Africa is proud to have a progressive neighbouring country, in terms of recognising gender equality as central to socio-economic, political and cultural development like Botswana,” she said.

She said another critical area of progress was in access to education.

Nonetheless, she indicated that some instances of proportional representation was not always ideal given that in some fields women were placed in positions whereby they were represented in numbers but not able to have a meaningful impact, while some were just used as a face for a certain organisation to seem more progressive.

“There is still a long way to go.  For our economic policies to promote the empowerment of women, we need to priorities a number of areas. At the centre of these is education and skills development,” she said. Ends