Gaborone — Stanbic Bank and Statistics Botswana have signed a monumental Memorandum of Agreement, which they envisage will help in shaping solutions towards youth unemployment and entrepreneurship.
Speaking during the signing ceremony in Gaborone this week, Statistician General for Statistics Botswana, Dr Burton Mguni said the agreement would be beneficial in collecting valuable insights about entrepreneurship that would inform policy shifts to enable a conducive environment for entrepreneurship and accelerated growth of youth businesses.
Dr Mguni further hailed the agreement with Stanbic Botswana as being beneficial since finance institutions were instrumental in the provision of capital for youth owned businesses.
He noted that financial services were a well situated partnership since they had insights about demographics, available markets and deeper knowledge of population trends.
Meanwhile, the chief executive officer of Stanbic Botswana, Mr Sam Minta said the agreement would be a chance to amplify and provide aggregate data that would highlight available opportunities for youth owned enterprises across the country’
"The problem of entrepreneurship and youth employability cannot be solved by one entity alone, but through collaboration and co-creation," he said.
He noted that big data was a tool that could be used to create value for different institutions, noting that it was up to the private sector to make large concessions to commoditise and create value out of that data.
He further reiterated that youth were catalysts in taking advantage of big data to create value and enterprise growth.
Moreover, Mr Minta said the Stanbic Business Acceler8 Centre, through its various mentoring spectrum, utilised data as a way to improve opportunities for entrepreneurs.
He further said the agreement would benefit from that configuration.
He emphasised that entrepreneurs should be encouraged to grow into billionaires as that would increase the capital opportunities of businesses and improve employability prospects for other youths.The Memorandum of Agreement marks a significant milestone for statistics Botswana as it provides an intersection with the private sector, whose result may catalyse policy imperatives for ease of business and employability for the youth. Source : BOPA