24 May 2021

Improving Botswana’s productivity and competitiveness is one of the fastest ways to escape the middle-income trap and spearhead Botswana transformation into a high-income economy by 2036.

Botswana National Productivity Centre (BNPC) executive director, Mr Christopher Diswai, said this in a webinar meeting to launch reports, which provided an in-depth assessment of Botswana’s competitiveness position.

Mr Diswai said providing accurate and timely competitiveness measures and indicators, as well as clear picture of where the country was, was also an important component that should not be neglected.

He said competitiveness measures and indicators would also help to establish the challenges the country was faced with so  as to effectively strive forward towards the national goal of achieving ‘Prosperity for All’ by 2036.

“It is on this premise that BNPC has partnered with the World Economic Forum, on a yearly basis, to assist in producing Botswana’s rankings in the Global Competitiveness Reports,” he said.

He indicated that BNPC had this year took a step further and engaged the Institute for Management Development (IMD) in order to obtain a more in-depth assessment of Botswana’s competitiveness position.

“Today’s event is mainly to disseminate results and findings of the three IMD reports, following which, BNPC would organise another webinar that would critically look at such results in the context of Botswana’s economic environment, as well as the challenges we face as a nation.  This future webinar will map the way forward and make policy direction recommendations aimed at improving Botswana’s competitiveness position,” he said.

BNPC productivity and quality awareness programme manager, Mr Teedzani Majaule said the information from the reports would guide in improving the country’s competitiveness.

He said challenges identified in the presentations were not far from what the country had identified as weak points.

Thus, he said there was need to convene and work together in order to ensure that all the identified weaknesses presented were addressed adequately.

“Unfortunately, due to the COVID -19 pandemic, we cannot do everything given our limited resources. We must prioritise areas of focus that will result in maximum impact,” he said.

The BNPC, he said would be engaging all key stakeholders to further interrogate the results in the reports in the coming months.

“We will hold another webinar where BNPC and other key stakeholders will be speaking to these results, but putting it in the context of Botswana’s economic environment and offering policy solutions to remedy the situation. This will ensure that no one is left behind during the process of improving this country’s competitiveness,” he said. Ends