04 Apr 2024

Botswana has a mutually beneficial relationship with the United Nations system in Botswana as the two sides engage intensely through candid meetings. President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi said during a courtesy call by under secretary seneral and executive secretary of United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Mr Claver Gatete and the president of the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA), Dr Sidi Ould Tah April 4.

Dr Masisi said Botswana also stood as a proud member of UNECA, especially that the organisations fully aligned to its mandate. He said with what the organisation had done for Botswana, the county stood as a good example of its effectiveness.

“We are grateful of what has been achieved by the partnership between us and we desire for it to go on and even expand,” he said.

Dr Masisi cited some of the successful works done between Botswana and UNECA as the Lobu small stock farm, the collaboration on SmartBots and the intention to have SmartBots lab serving the whole Africa from Botswana.

He said Botswana also stood ready to be the test case and inspirer for the region.

He commended Mr Gatete with the speed that he eased himself into his new job ever since his appointment in November last year. He also assured the two organisations of Botswana’s support, and said that Botswana as a developing country presented some of the most attractive attributes for any development practitioner.

“We are relatively small in size, organised, so every time you drop a dollar the distance it travels exceeds most because of our frugality and transparency, the efficacy that we demonstrate and the track record we manifest,” he said.

In that regard, Dr Masisi said, the two organisations were welcome to grant any resources or funds in whatever developmental experiments they might want to try out or if they wanted to realise the fastest impact with the investment they had put in.

He said such was apparent in the Citrus Project, which recently produced its first harvest, as well as the mining sector, whose proceeds the country had translated into programmes and projects that benefitted the larger citizenry. He also cautioned African countries to always patent and copyright innovations and creations so that they could be tradable internationally.

For his part, Mr Gatete said Africa could turn into an exporter, should the continent do everything from production and processing up to the final level with its raw materials. He said there was also a need to look at the regional value chains. Mr Gatete said when developing regional projects, there was also a need to ensure that they did not just benefit the host country, but the region as a whole.

He said in that way, it would be easier to bring in the private sector and reduce the burden on governments.

He also said in setting up beneficiation centres for raw materials, ECA would prioritise areas where the focus raw material was in abundance. “We also wanted to start in areas that make a big difference, and the reason we started in Botswana was because of the existing good governance, quality control, standards and others.

The reason Botswana has been certified to export beef to Europe is because of its good traceability, to the extent of even having traceability for each cow,” he said.

He said Botswana was a breath of fresh air in a continent where it was difficult to have a combination of good governance and quality standards of everything in a country, which he said called for the need to benchmark on Botswana. Mr Gatete also said the foundation that Botswana had laid in terms of Internet connectivity in the rural areas warranted her to be assisted to speed up the process and make the country a centre of excellence in the use of technology across various sectors.

For his part, Dr Tah also reiterated his organisation’s support to President Masisi’s vision to graduate Botswana to a high-income country.

“We would like to stress our desire to support you according to your priorities and your vision and to have Botswana as a role model for other African countries as her success story could be good even for the whole continent,” he said.

He said that BADEA had worked with Botswana since 1978, first through a livestock support project, and later worked together on some road, electricity and water projects with the last one being in 2007, which he said was too distant a past and therefore called for a re-engagement. ENDS