Youth, women positioned for energy sector opportunities

The programme is a partnership between Seth Resources Petroleum, BA ISAGO University, eMangweni Business Solutions, Botswana Oil Limited and the Presidential Youth Empowerment Campaign (PYEC), and it seeks to equip youth, women and citizen-owned enterprises with practical knowledge, technical skills and business opportunities across the oil and gas value chain. Officially launching the programme, Minister of Youth and Gender Affairs Lesego Chombo described the initiative as more than a training programme, calling it a national mission to position Batswana at the centre of future economic opportunities. “This landmark project is more than an economic initiative.

It is a national mission and a covenant between the state and citizens. Its purpose is to capacitate our people to take ownership of emerging industries, create jobs, drive innovation and ensure that the wealth of our nation is not reserved for a privileged few, but becomes the inheritance of all,” Chombo said. She noted that while Botswana’s development story had been built on diamonds over the past six decades, the country could not rely on the same economic model for the next 60 years.

“The economy that carried us over the past 60 years cannot be the economy that carries us into the next 60,” she said. Chombo said government’s vision was to build a diversified, export-driven and people-centred economy in which every citizen is empowered to participate meaningfully in national development. She further stressed that youth development could not be separated from economic development and argued that the challenge facing many young people was not necessarily the absence of opportunities but rather their exclusion from existing ones.

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“The issue is not only the absence of opportunity. It is exclusion from existing opportunity,” she said. It is a clear signal that the government’s purse is empty and that our own behaviour has left veterinary officials fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.

We have been here before. During COVID-19, many of us thought we knew better. We ignored simple rules, we carried on as if the danger was someone else’s problem, and the virus took lives and left our economy on its knees.

We are still broke from that experience. Yet now, with FMD…

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