LEA, BIUST partner to develop entrepreneurship
Koketso Kgoboge | Friday November 16, 2018 13:18
The LEA chief executive officer, Dr Racious Moatshe and BIUST vice chancellor, Professor Otlogetswe Totolo signed the MoU at the University campus on Wednesday.
Totolo stated that the collaboration would deepen the commitment of the two organisations to strengthen the core missions of research, innovation and application.
The vice chancellor said the specific areas of collaboration include identifying and delivering appropriate entrepreneurship and skills training for potential entrepreneurs at BIUST.
He said it would contribute to LEA’s assisted small, medium and micro enterprises (SMME) by facilitating placement and attachments of BIUST students to enhance the SMMEs.
Totolo added that the collaboration would help graduates learn ways of interacting with society as engineers, scientists and technologists, and to understand the issues and challenges bedevilling the community.
“This would assist them to come up with appropriate and relevant solutions to the challenges that our bigger society is facing. We want to produce graduates that would bring a positive impact to the society,” he said.
He noted that the professors and students, through their research efforts, should be able to come up with products and services that can be taken up by Batswana to truly diversify the economy of the nation.
He said BIUST and LEA had a mammoth task to upgrade Batswana skills and influence them to become entrepreneurs that would survive the world after the minerals.
“This partnership emphasises our mutual desire to push the boundaries to ensuring that we achieve that what our people expect from both of us, ” he said.
For his part, Moatshe noted that BIUST as an institution that was set up with a specific mandate to helping the agenda of economic development would rightfully complement his organisation towards the notable achievement of SMMEs development.
He noted that the world over, the innovating countries are the ones that are getting it right. Economic growth, he said, is usual accelerated by the innovations and technologies that are taking place, “…and BIUST is where all the innovations, ideas and inventions come from”. Moatshe said through the collaboration they would be able to contextualise the innovations and ideas within the business framework.
“We would be able to commercialise the innovations and ideas such that products could come out of there to create jobs, to feed the nation and largely to contributed to the GDP of the country,” he said.