05 Feb 2024

Government will spend a substantial budgetary provision of P20.82 billion under both development and recurrent budget for game-changing programmes and projects as well as high value strategic investments in the 2024/2025 financial year. Delivering the budget speech yesterday, Minister of Finance, Ms Peggy Serame said the proposed budget for the 2024/2025 financial year was a stimulus budget with an overall increase of 23.5 per cent compared to the current year’s approved budget. Ms Serame said as a developing economy, government would continue to stimulate growth, create employment and focus on sectors with great potential to transform the lives of Batswana. “In this regard, I am proposing significant increases of 317 per cent for sport development, 280.9 per cent for research and development, 58.8 per cent for creative arts, while infrastructure development will be increased by 33.5 per cent,” she said. She added that another significant provision had been made for the acquisition of strategic assets. Again, she said preliminary data released by Statistics Botswana indicated that the informal sector contributed 3.2 per cent to economic growth in 2023. “We believe there is great potential for the informal sector to play a more meaningful role in overall economic development and job creation. Therefore, we are creating a revolving fund, named Chema Chema Fund, with an initial capital injection of P200 million, aimed at fundamentally transforming the informal sector and creating more employment opportunities,” she said. In addition, she said government would also establish an Intellectual Property (IP) Motshelo Scheme and an Intellectual Property Ideas Incubation Centre to support indigenous research and innovation. She explained that the scheme together with the centre, would empower Batswana to own and protect their intellectual property assets. “In addition to the above key strategic interventions, the 2024-2025 proposed budget recognises agriculture as one of the critical sectors in our economy. This sector remains important to our economy because of the business and export potential it promises as well as it centrality to livelihood,” she said. The minister further highlighted the need to make agriculture more productive and appealing to the youth in order to diversify the economy and create sustainable jobs, hence the substantial increase in the proposed budget for the sector. ends