29 Nov 2022

Absa Bank Botswana’s unwavering support towards helping advance youth owned businesses has seen the bank part with approximately P2 million over two years, beginning last year.

In a statement recently issued, the bank says 20 entrepreneurs had directly benefited from the investment overlay supported by the flagship Hackathon and Incubation Programme.

In an interview, Absa Botswana managing director, Ms Keabetswe Pheko-Moshagane said the bank focused on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and developing solutions for challenges encountered in running their businesses.

Ms Pheko-Moshagane said for the past two years, the programme had been conducted entirely on a digital platforms and interest was initiated through putting out a call for applications on their social media pages.

She said the call targeted Batswana developers between the ages of 18 and 35 years to enroll for the programme in teams comprising three to six members.

“These teams go through an ideation phase where they submit their ideas on the online platform followed by the first submission of their proposed solutions to a panel of judges. Our judges comprise our senior staff members with the relevant technical and industry skills as well as experts from the public and private sectors,” Ms Pheko-Moshagane said.

Following presentations on proposed solutions, she said judges shortlisted up to three teams for training and incubation component of the programme, where rigorous mentorship and training sessions for inventing solutions envisaged was administered.

She said the phase also included all-inclusive entrepreneurship development workshops meant to pass-on fundamentals of running a successful venture.

For technical support, she added that each member of the teams was provided with a laptop, Internet access for six months and a UDEMY license for one year to enable developers to share and access valuable educational content online.

Again, she said secondary to such dispensations was funds to be won by positions one, two and three which were P60 000, P40 000 and P20 000 respectively.

She said throughout the years, overall beneficiaries were not only from the tech space but also from the field of academic research in the agricultural sector.

Meanwhile, Ms Pheko-Moshagane said they recently honoured the 2022 cycle winners who took part in the Absa Incubation Programme.

She said the three teams being Team Binary Thoughts, Digital Lead and EO Analytics were challenged with using their unique coding ability to find creative ways to transform the agricultural sector in Botswana and bring their ideas to life.

She said the bank would continue to offer a development and maintenance contract with the winning teams over each cycle to polish their innovations and get them market ready.

She acknowledged that market access remained a challenge locally, however, she promised that throughout the incubation their efforts to expose young developers to the market remained their priority.

“The intervention takes into perspective exposing them to the networks the bank has across various businesses in the continent,” she said. ENDS