Good tidings. I trust that all is well as we wrap up the month of love. I personally have seen better days due to firstly choosing to support Liverpool FC, and secondly, the untimely and senseless passing of Keirnan Jarryd Forbes, better known as AKA. Rest in power King. You paid the price to be the boss, the main oeun.
To refresh your memory, in my last piece I talked about the business’s challenge of being physically present and digitally relevant, a subject that I believe should be top of mind for every CEO as the landscape continues to shape, shift and evolve. In today’s discussion, I wish to bring into focus the future state of our education sector in Botswana. My intention is really to provide a conduit for self-reflection and stimulate a kind of discussions that can bring about the change that we so desire and need.
Since our last conversation, there have been a few significant events occurring first by way of respite for the consumer as headline inflation decreased from 12.4 in December 2023 to 9.3 percent in January 2023. We also had the reading and presentation of the Botswana 2023/4 Budget Speech by the Minister of Finance, Peggy Serame. It is also worth noting that we ushered in the Transitional National Development Plan for Botswana through the lens of Vision 2036 as we bring to a close the National Development Plan 11 in March 2023.
We are not unaware of the major challenges that we face from a geopolitical standpoint, highlighting the tensions and conflict in Ukraine, which have caused disruptions in global supply chains and brought about a litany of challenges to businesses globally. Under the Rest and Reclaim agenda, we are set to focus on the six national priorities viz digital transformation, business environment reform, sustaining livelihoods and climate change, infrastructure development, and value chain development supported by an overarching priority of human capital development.
Transitional development aligns the national development planning process with the electoral process and allows the administration to implement its specific plan. As part of the TNDP (Transitional National Development Plan), digital transformation was provisionally accorded P2,62 billion geared at accelerating digital connectivity nationwide to close the connectivity gap, moving government services online, leveraging smart technologies to address food security, and transforming the education sector.
With regard to education, it has recently occurred to me how technology is making our daily lives easier. For instance, to write an article in this era, you are able to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and produce better quality in half the time it would have taken you to do it ten years ago.
The time saved can be used on other value adding activities. Infact, the knowledge worker of the future will use AI to eliminate non-value-adding activities and focus on higher-tier activities.
The main challenge we face today in our education sector is around the relevance of the mediums, channels, and content available for maximum impact. We face an almost overwhelming deluge of information on the worldwide web (www) which, without being distilled, will not see the needle being moved in preparing a digitally ready generation. It is almost paradoxical that during the information age, we still grapple with less-than-desirable pass rates in our tiers of education.
The burning platform that will enable us to achieve the Vision 2036 goal of becoming an upper middle-income country is highly reliant on the ability of the education system to produce the kind of products that do not only swallow and regurgitate information but rather assimilate, contextualise, and create systems, processes and delivery mechanisms that are digitally relevant for our market.
What do digital learning outcomes look like? How can technology help us better systems of instruction that are contextual to the future? What will the school of the future look like? Digital transformation takes on a broader outlook than most people envisage and needs to have an enterprise-wide outlook cutting across functions and ensuring collaboration between the government and private sector.
Montwedi Bakwena.
I would like to hear your thoughts and comments on this piece at montybakwena@gmail.com
