22 Sep 2026

In order to address the challenge of youth unemployment and poverty, the government is working on investing in upskilling the youth to be entrepreneurial and job ready, in order to unlock opportunities to benefit from artificial intelligence (AI) in the modern digitalised world.

This was said by the President Advocate Duma Boko while partaking in the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Generation Unlimited (GenU) panel discussion in New York City, United States of America on Monday.

President Boko said the government was looking to provide solutions to existing economic challenges facing the nation by positioning the country to attract efficient foreign direct investment (FDI), building skills and entrepreneurial pathways as well as providing opportunities in rural communities.

He told his audience that while the government understood the need for FDI to catapult economic growth, there was a need for the right type of investment to unlock opportunities.

“We have seen three types of FDI, the first being resource seeking, where investors come and look to cut away ore in the raw, which is not the best form of investment. The second type is market seeking; and the third is efficiency seeking, which is where the real opportunities are. If we are to attract that efficiency seeking FDI, we need to deploy effort into skills provision for our young people,” Adv Boko said.

He said the government was working on commencing an initiative to provide employability training to about 10 000 youth, and preparing to partner with the private sector to provide requisite skills to the youth.

“Efficiency seeking FDI will leverage on AI to resolve some of the problems of speed, efficiency to provide solutions in the shortest possible time, and we need to have our young people attain the requisite skills to participate,” President Boko said.

In addition to being trained to be job-ready, President Boko said government also sought to avail training for the youth to be entrepreneurial.

“We need the youth to take an active part in the productive sectors of the economy, to generate goods themselves and service, something we require urgently since we have sparsely populated areas, and some of our young people are in the rural areas. We have to then engage in a rural industrialisation programme that draws on leverages of AI to generate the efficiencies,” Adv Boko said.

He added that government was investing in availing internet access to assist information communication technology (ICT) business start-ups to mine information required to be innovative.

“The government in Botswana has created several pathways, among them the Botswana Innovation Hub, assisting start-ups to create something of value from their ideas. One of the most critical factors is ease of access to relevant data, which is the currency most youth tech start-ups require to deploy to generate solutions, and to that end the government is working on aggressive digitalisation,” Adv Boko said.

The panel discussion, hosted by UNICEF at the UN Plaza in New York, was held as part of the annual UNICEF GenU Global Leadership Council held under the theme "The Youth Dividend: Turning AI and Green Investments into Skilling & Livelihood Opportunities."

This year’s gathering sought to address the challenge of 1.2 billion youth in emerging markets and developing economies being anticipated to enter the workforce by 2035, whereas only 400 million jobs are currently projected.

Co-chaired by UNICEF Executive Director, Ms Catherine M. Russell and the Global Chairman of one of the world’s top four accounting firms, PwC, Mr Mohamed Kande, the gathering hosted two heads of state, President Boko and his Namibian counterpart Ms Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, scores of UN and development agency policy makers, business executives and youth entrepreneurs. ENDS