Summit on job-creation imminent

Goitsemodimo Kaelo | Friday October 9, 2015 16:59

The inaugural Job Summit, which is expected to be an annual event will see experts in different sectors of the economy converge to share ideas on the economy as well as come up with resolutions to create sustainable industries for job creation.

This year’s summit will be held under the theme ‘A roadmap to sustainable job-creation’.

One of the organisers, Lawrence Ookeditse told Mmegi that the unemployment rate has prompted researchers to convene this summit after realising that criticising government will not solve the issue of joblessness.

The unemployment rate in the country currently stands at 20 percent according to Statistics Botswana.

Ookeditse said the summit promises not to turn into a talk shop, as they will engage Information Communications Technology (ICT) experts who will create a data collection system that will record every single job that is created after the summit to gauge the impact.

“This summit is about bringing practical and imperial solutions to the issue of unemployment in the country. Vice President, Mokgweetsi Masisi whose portfolio covers job-creation will officiate at the summit,” he said.

Ookeditse indicated that the summit has to formulate a resolution paper to be presented to government and the private sector for reference during policy-making.

He said that currently it is not easy to find information as to how many jobs are created by different sectors of the economy per month.

Recently Statistics Botswana said that they do not have a system that captures how many jobs each sector creates monthly.

They said that while it is their intention to have such information readily available in their monthly consumer indices report, this has not been the case.