Africa SME body honours Boko

The President of the All Africa Association for Small and Medium Enterprises (AAASME), Dr Ebiekure Eradiri has honoured President Advocate Duma Boko with the UbuntuSusu Continental SME Billion Fund recognition. The presentation was made on the sidelines of the Trade Up North 10th Anniversary in Francistown on Thursday. Speaking after the presentation, Dr Eradiri said the recognition acknowledges President Boko’s commitment to growing SMEs and creating an enabling environment for small businesses in Botswana.

He said Botswana’s ‘Beyond Diamond’ agenda and the UbuntuSusu Continental SMEs Fund shared the same objective of building an economy where enterprise, not extraction, drove national prosperity. Dr Eradiri said AAASME had established the UbuntuSusu SMEs Fund at the tune of $1.4 billion to assist SMEs in Africa to access finance. He said the major challenge facing SMEs in Africa and across the globe was access to finance and access to markets, noting that financial lenders often imposed stringent conditions.

For Botswana, Dr Eradiri said the recognition and the Fund presented an opportunity for local SMEs to tap into continental financing, markets and partnerships, and to benefit from what he described as ‘African solutions to African problems’. The UbuntuSusu Continental SME Billion Fund is an Afrocentric financing initiative aimed at mobilising 125 million SMEs across Africa to pool resources and access funding. The Fund seeks to catalyse economic growth and accelerate prosperity in line with Aspiration 1 of the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

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President Boko welcomed the honour, saying government remained committed to supporting SMEs as key drivers of job creation, economic diversification and contribution towards Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Meanwhile, the Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, Mr Noah Salakae, said the transport system and the mining sector were interlinked and cannot survive on their own. He said while the transport sector did not extract minerals, it moved them, exported them and delivered their value to the nation. The minister said extraction would be meaningless without a viable method of transportation of raw materials to processing facilities.

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