29 Aug 2022

Women in Business Association (WIBA) has embarked on a mobilisation drive to encourage the community in the Ngamiland region to participate in African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) competition billed for October.

The competition aims to motivate Batswana to exploit AGOA’s opportunity to expand their market base. AGOA is a trade arrangement between the United States and Sub-Saharan African countries including Botswana which provides relaxed access to American Market. It ends in 2025. 

WIBA chairperson for the Maun region, Ms Christinah Leshego confirmed in an interview that the AGOA competition was open to all local businesses across the country, noting that it covered businesses such as arts and crafts, jewellery, natural ingenious products, leather products, textile, horticulture and agro-processing among others.

“Registration is ongoing and the competition is in October on a date to be announced soon. Through the competition, the idea is to encourage Batswana to revive their firms and increase production to exploit the AGOA market,” she said.

She expressed disappointment that Batswana had failed to utilise the opportunity for the past 20 years as the implementation of AGOA trade scheme had failed dismally because of inadequate awareness of the scheme.

She expressed hope that those who had entered the competition would have the opportunity to be trained to be export ready and capitalise on the remaining three years.

Ms Leshego revealed that WIBA was keen to have a pool of companies which they could rely on noting that capacity building would be ideal as the identified companies would match the export standard required by AGOA.

“This is a free lucrative trade scheme which we want to see more locals benefiting from it for better profits. We are now left with only three years before this trade arrangement comes to an end I believe this competition will help motivate more companies to be export ready,” she added.

She said Batswana were capable but they were not doing much in terms of production because of lack of market and hoped the competition would be an eye opener for them to see how best they could go further with their investment.

She said AGOA was offering readily available markets adding that recently, she managed to send 20 handicraft samples from the Ngamiland region to America through Botswana Investment Trade Centre (BITC) and hoped soon they would start exporting more products. BITC encourages domestic investment and expansion and promotes locally manufactured goods to regional and international markets. The last time, they exported some products, she said was in 2017.  ENDs