25 Jul 2024

Small businesses in Francistown have been called upon to register their enterprises to ensure harmony.

The city mayor, Mr Godisang Radisigo, made the statement on Wednesday during the joint Francistown City Council and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Financial Literacy and Small Business Management Skills workshop meant to empower small businesses in Francistown.

The training is right on the heels of the second city and the UNDP Informal Sector Strategy, which was adopted in 2022. It is in line with the transformation agenda and intended to ignite growth in the sector to align it with the city’s development aspirations.

To this end, Mr Radisigo made a clarion call to the attendants to make sure they registered all their business with the city council to keep unnecessary brawls with the city authority at bay.

He underscored the informal sector’s importance to the growth of any business and country, which he said was the primary reason Francistown City Council had resolved to take the sector on board.

He also urged those in the informal sector to engage and learn during training, something he said would help grow the sector and ensure even more significant financial spin-offs.

For her part, the UNDP project manager for Inclusive Economic Diversification said the training, provided by the Francistown City Council and the UNDP, was meant to strengthen the informal sector’s resilience to unforeseen economic shocks. Ms Kefhilwe Mokotedi stated that many lessons had been derived from the COVID-19 pandemic, which dealt a hard blow to the informal sector. 

As such, the city of Francistown, in conjunction with UNDP, had devised a strategy to guard against similar occurrences that might occur in the future. According to Ms Mokotedi, the three-day training workshop would shed more light on financial prudence, record-keeping, and many other peripheral business matters to maximise the growth of the informal economy.

Dr Gladys Gamariel, the consultant for the three-day workshop, emphasised the importance of mindset change among aspiring businesses.

She said one could be armed to the teeth with business ideas and concepts, but if such person’s mentality was not attuned to scale the business, they were likely to fail.  Ends