19 Feb 2020

Government needs to review the current education policies to align them with the desire to transform the country from a resource-driven economy to a diversified knowledge based economy.

Speaking at the tertiary education statistics dissemination seminar, Human Resource Development Council, CEO, Dr Raphael Dingalo said that it was imperative for government to invest more in the education and training sector in an effort to attain its developmental and transformational goals.

He said knowledge creation and the application of knowledge had become central to economic growth as the world moves from being a resource-based economy to knowledge-based economy.

Botswana’s economy, he said, was heavily dependent on resources, which would not last forever, therefore it was pleasing that government had joined the world in the desire to transform the country’s economy.

Dr Dingalo said government had over the years been committed to increasing access to tertiary education through the provisions of government student’s sponsorship.

He said the contribution of tertiary education to a country’s development was immeasurable as it had been established that there is a direct correlation between higher education and level of development.

He said the number of tertiary education students sponsored by government increased from 28 976 in 2009/10 to 48 703 in 2012/13, which constituted a 68.1 per cent increase over the five-year period, there after the number decreased to 38 806 in 2016/17.

He stated that the number of graduates increased from 6 431 in 2013 to 15 594 in 2014, a increase that he said would be necessitated by the government initiative to upgrade primary and four school teachers from level five (diploma) to level six (degree), thus there was an increase in graduates for Bachelor’s degree programmes,  especially in the fields of education, science, humanities and the arts.

Dr Dingalo stated that the gross tertiary enrollment ration  indicates a decline in the gross tertiary ration from 20.2 per cent in 2016/17 to 18.2 per cent in 2017/18, adding that it was observed that there has been an improvement in access to tertiary education as evidenced by the upward trend in the gross tertiary education enrollment rate which rose from 11.4 per cent in 2007/08 to 20.2 per cent in 2016/17.

He said Botswana experienced a slight increase in the tertiary enrollment participation rates  from 2007 to 2016, but however dropped in 2017 to 18.2 per cent from 22.2 per cent in 2016,  which means that the provision of access to tertiary education has improved a little in relation to the population of the official age group of 18-24 years.

Dr Dingalo noted  that only  30.19 per cent of candidates who sat for BGCSE in 2016 managed to transit to tertiary education, implying that almost 70 per cent of the students  who sat for BGCSE enrolled for certificate programmes from both public and private institutions with the majority of them enrolling for technical and vocational education.

He thus added that it was only fitting for government to self-introspect and explore how far the country was moving from the resource based to knowledge based economy.

The realiasation of the transformation agenda, he said was now driving Botswana to make major changes to its education system in order to begin to produce a new workforce, which would create new knowledge.

He said any country, which sought to become part of the globalised knowledge economy, had to produce a new generation of knowledge workers. ENDS