22 Jun 2026

The Botswana Insurance Company (BIC) has been commended for creating a platform where financial and insurance institutions come together to plan for a better future for Batswana in the financial services industry.

This is so particularly that the financial sector plays a critical role in the advancement of the economic transformation agenda of the nation.

For Botswana whose development story has been shaped in large measure by diamonds, the shift carried a notable significance and reinforced the importance of broadening the economic base, deepening productivity, and creating new sources of growth alongside the industries that had served the country well, Vice President and Minister of Finance, Mr Ndaba Gaolathe, said.

Addressing the 4th BIC Annual Thought Leadership Conference 2026 at Royal Aria on Friday, Mr Gaolathe thanked the BIC for convening the conference held under the theme: From Resilience to Transformation, a theme that speaks directly to the challenge facing the nation.

He said resilience enabled people to withstand disruption while transformation them to shape what came next.

Earlier this year, government was confronted with difficult truths about public finances, weaknesses in critical systems, and the realities facing many citizens, particularly unemployment and constrained opportunities, realities that demanded decisive action.

Mr Gaolathe said the first responsibility was to stop the haemorrhaging and restore fiscal stability especially that transformation could not be built on unstable foundations.

That is why the 2026/2027 Budget marked the beginning of a New Era of Economic Transformation and Fiscal Prudence, Mr Gaolathe said.

“Our vision, our True North, is a high-income, export-driven, digitally enabled, and people-centred economy. Achieving it requires a more diversified and productive economy that creates meaningful employment, expands opportunity, and enables more citizens to participate, contribute, and prosper. Yet our ambition reaches further still. We seek to build Botswana into the best-managed nation on the African continent, a paragon of unity, fairness, and inclusive growth, anchored in dignity, responsibility, and shared prosperity,” said Mr Gaolathe.

He further stated that the Botswana Economic Transformation Programme (BETP) brought the role into sharp focus and as the national platform for execution, it served as the bridge between aspiration and achievement, bringing together government, business, investors, and citizens around a shared objective of unlocking investment, accelerating growth, and expanding opportunity.

The programme focuses on sectors with the greatest potential to become new engines of growth, investment, and employment, including agriculture, mining and energy, manufacturing, tourism, infrastructure, healthcare, financial services, and digitalisation.

Mr Gaolathe said  many promising enterprises across the country remained trapped in the missing middle and had outgrown informal financing, yet struggled to access the capital required for expansion.

Their success he said would depend on the ability to mobilise capital at scale, manage risk intelligently, crowd in private investment, and build confidence across the economy and this, was where the financial services sector, and indeed the insurance fraternity, assumed a role that was both strategic and indispensable.

The insurance performs a vital function within the ecosystem as the economic transformation inevitably involves risk and the new industries carry uncertainty, Mr Gaolathe said and added that infrastructure projects required long-term capital and climate-related events threatened livelihoods and productive assets and insurance helped convert that uncertainty into manageable risk, allowing businesses to invest more confidently, lenders to extend capital more comfortably, and households to recover more quickly when adversity struck.

Botswana Insurance Company Group CEO, Mr Newton Jazire said the conference was an opportunity for banks, insurance companies, pension funds and fintechs to meet and come up with strategies of providing and enhancing better services to their customers.

He said financial inclusion was at the centre of all of their efforts, yet had been driving their services with conventional methods of selling that looked at the formally employed individuals while they were many others outside that bracket.

Mr Jazire said it was important to come up with ways of tapping into that industry that held a lot of cash in their hands and get them involved into the financial system.

He said with Artificial Intelligence, new technologies and financial challenges, trust became key hence the need to continue working on the same, for the benefit of customers.

This he said this was possible through partnerships with other sectors, and for the financial sector to survive.

Insurance Mr Jazire said, remained an important risk management framework for the country’s economic development and also in increasing financial inclusion. ENDS