The sector’s engagement with government continued to improve. Four formal meetings were held in the calendar year 2008 involving the Ministry of Communications Science and Technology along with other stakeholders in the ICT industry. In addition to these there were several other meetings that involved the likes of the Botswana Innovation Hub and ICT sector members among themselves.
Among the achievements that these meetings spawned are:
An improved relationship and sharing of issues between government and the private sector;
Achievement in bringing focus onto sector development issues – for example the study on whether the telecommunications liberalisation process is achieving its intentions of ICT sector growth and competitiveness;
Development of a paper on unlocking impediments to ecommerce in Botswana so that further business opportunities can be unleashed through using more e-transaction facilities in Botswana;
A discussion on how ICT opportunities can be extracted from government mega projects so that these ICT opportunities can be identified and availed throughout the cycle of the projects;
Standardisation of Invitation to Tender and Statement of user Requirement documents for ICT procurement.
Some of the issues that still need to be achieved in this engagement process include:
Getting government to progress the establishment an inclusive Information Age Council as proposed in Maitlamo and also in line with the thinking of Vision 2016;
Better coordination of how ICT interests and issues are discussed and presented so that the issues covered are more representative of all stakeholder issues;
Identification of areas of ICT business areas that can be deemed as “quick-win” areas to allow easier market access to these areas without going through cumbersome procurement processes.
ICT Graduate and Youth Unemployment
In the year 2008 the sector had pledged to try and find ways to help mop up a seemingly high number of unemployed ICT graduates. It appeared from previous studies that the number of unemployed ICT graduates was disproportionately higher than the national unemployment average.
Some of the measures that government put in place or is presently undertaking to facilitate in order to improve youth employment include:
Tax incentives;
Internship programs;
Training levies and training rebates.
The ICT sector has not taken advantage of these in a coordinated manner. In order to improve on the rate of employment of the youth trained in ICT some of the issues that need to be clarified are:
Coordination between the government, BURS , BOTA and the ICT sector on acceptable training programs that qualify for tax rebates;
A better understanding of all the employment and training incentives and how they relate to each other.
This sector needs to continue showing commitment to addressing this issue by engaging with the different stakeholders.
