22 Sep 2019

 Ambassador of the United States of America to Botswana has urged the United States Government fellowship Alumni in Botswana to use the knowledge they learned within their respective fellowship programmes to create socially sustainable programmes in their societies to bring change.

Mr Craig Cloud was speaking at the United States Government Exchange Alumni symposium held in Gaborone recently.

He commended fellows for the social work they were currently doing in their individual capacities.

Ambassador Cloud said he expected fellows to contribute to social change in the country through collaboration with government to ensure that they actualised the social contract expected of their fellowship.

Fulbright Specialist Dr Latha Poonamallee also encouraged fellows to recognise the importance of understanding how civil society worked.

According to Dr Poonamallee, understanding the social context would help fellows refocus social change strategies in order to broaden the scope of social entrepreneurship in the country.

She explained that the world was getting to a state where financial codes were important to solving social problems, thus fellows should start scalable social entrepreneurship programmes since they were much more innovative in today’s market.

Dr Poonamallee further encouraged fellows to make reviews of stakeholder issues as a move away from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism to deal with issues emanating from the continually competitive and shrinking resource base from donors.

“Putting value on social entrepreneurship is critical in capturing real growth from social entrepreneurship withstanding a holistic approach on a national entrepreneurship policy implement,” she said.

Dr Poonamallee further said government should consider social entrepreneurship as something that could be utilised to create capital while catering for social needs.

She noted that Botswana was in a better position to produce social entrepreneurs as the country’s social nets were accommodative for Batswana to take risks in social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurship has been described as a refocus business models and distribution strategies to deal with social problems. Ends