If there is one area that, as a country, we have to develop if we are to successfully fight poverty and unemployment, it is the informal sector.
At the moment, the informal sector holds the greatest potential.
It is an area of growth because, by and large, it remains undeveloped, under-developed and, to be frank, neglected.
Perhaps because of our education system, which has tended to put undue emphasis and misplaced premium on office work and white collar jobs, many of our people are still nursing a hangover whereby they look down at the informal sector askance.
The truth of the matter is that countries that have moved ahead, especially in Asia, Latin America and, indeed, in certain parts of Africa have a history where there were concerted efforts to cultivate, nurture and grow the informal sector.
By its very nature, the informal sector employs infinitely higher numbers of people.
The sector is also easy to maintain because it requires few overheads, fewer and less expensive technological inputs, as well as not to highly and or specialized skills.
As experience from many other countries shows, unemployment is a serious national security threat that we only ignore at our own peril.
Like poverty, unemployment eats and erodes one’s sense of self-esteem and dignity.
While Botswana is blessed with the mineral wealth of diamonds, the reality is that even during the times when our mines churned out billions of Pula non-stop, the highest number of people the mines could employ at any given time stood at 6000.
There is no disputing the fact that money so extracted from the mines was used to help create employment in other sectors, not much attention was given to mounting a deliberate march towards creating a vibrant informal sector.
We call on Government to benchmark with such countries like India and China to get a rough idea how those countries have been able to develop their informal sectors.
The idea of flee-markets and building stalls so that traders could operate from under one roof and also help enhance their synergies are just a few we can, as a country, explore.
Where such ideas have been implemented, albeit at a small scale like is the case at the Gaborone bus ranks, they have proved very popular and immensely rewarding to those who had been lucky to get a space.
Crucially, ways have to be found to create linkages between the informal and formal sectors.
Many of the big corporations are interested in outsourcing some of their non-core operations to the informal sector.
What the big corporations often demand is guarantee in quality, consistency and critical volumes so that their operations and or supply chains are not disrupted.
By its very nature, the informal sector employs a greater number of people, many of them women and the young.
We hope that such Government agencies like the Central Statistics office can become handy in quantifying the country’s untapped potential in developing a vibrant informal sector.
Having said that, we want to emphasise that the world over research has shown that efforts to create employment or reduce unemployment invariably always fail unless they are accompanied by attempts to make the informal sector an integral component of such efforts.
The biggest problem that most people in the informal sector, many of them women, have to contend with at the moment is deciphering and discerning what government policy really is towards them and their sector.
While on the one hand a Presidential Directive clearly spells out that government ministries, government departments, parastatals, government companies and agencies should support the informal sector by way of setting aside small spaces from which these people can operate, on the other hand local government authorities, chiefly the Gaborone City Council, go around literally uprooting informal sector operations because they are interpreted as a hygienic eye sore to the bye-law officials that enforce the regulations of the municipality.
We hope that going forward a way will also have to be found to harmonise our many disparate policies that affect this sector.
