Botswana is at the crossroads in its efforts to develop a robust human resource capital.
Over the years, in fact, since immediately after independence, it has always been one of Government’s key policy objectives to create a strong human resource base.
Human resource development was the top most priority for the post independent state because the departing colonial government had left Botswana with no such resource to talk about.
In that regard education always received a lion’s share of the total national budget.
Many schools right from primary school to tertiary were built to see this objective through.
In the early days, the immediate goal was to train personnel to help run the still fledgling civil services.
Thus, cautious of this objective the University of Botswana put particular emphasis on producing graduates in the spheres of humanities and social sciences; public administration, economics, sociology, accounting, demography and related subjects.
More emphasis was also placed on producing teachers in various fields. Because for a long time the need for these graduates far surpassed the supply, the phrase “unemployed graduate” was effectively unheard of.
But by the early 1990, it was beginning to be clear that certain areas of specialization were becoming saturated.
At that time, it became clear that there was a likelihood that we had produced more graduates in certain disciplines than the economy was able to absorb or needed them.
In the same token, it became clear that our overall education policy had neglected other areas, most notably the engineering and technical disciplines, including but not limited to medicine.
While, with time, the mismatch between what our education system churned out and what the economy needed got more pronounced, we took long to respond.
Of course, there were attempts in the past as when it became a Government policy to extend generous grants to students who opted to pursue studies in disciples identified as scarce while those following subjects that had reached saturation point received government loans with stricter repayment conditions attached.
But still that was not enough, not least because there was not in place an institution with a clear mandate and responsibility to monitor and ensure that what the education system produced matched the industrial needs.
Organised business, through Botswana Confederation of Commerce Industry and Manpower (BOCCIM) sent out signals of a general and increasingly pervasive mismatch between what the economy needed to continue growing and that which was coming out at the tail end of the education system.
The most significant attempt by Government to address the anomaly thus far has been the Kedikilwe Commission, which was tasked with coming up with recommendations and advise Government of just how the education system needed to be recast to respond to new challenges.
Almost 20 years since that Commission submitted its report to the President, just how effective it has been in real life is a debate best left to educationalists, policy analysts and human resource experts.
 What we, however, know is that the problem of a mismatch has persisted.
This has resulted not only in denying the economy a constant supply of most needed skills, but has also meant that money that was most needed elsewhere was instead put to other uses.
In the end, because we could not get our priorities right it meant that we ended up paying more for imported labour, while graduates trained at a great cost to the country walked the streets unemployed, and some unemployable simply because they were of a sort the economy no longer needed.
Government has now established the Human Resource Development Council, which reports directly to the Minister of Education.
Among other things, the Council (which, we hope in time will become a standalone statutory organ, fully autonomous in law and in practice) will seek to redress the mismatch and disparities from the past.
The sooner that is done the better!
It is our hope that in going about its mandate, the Council will work as closely as possible with the private sector to establish what their skills priorities are.
It is also important that a national skills audit is carried out to establish what we have, what is needed and what the future patterns are likely to look like.
It is important that while we produce those skills that our economy needs, at the same time we also have another eye on the international market.
It is high time Botswana exported skills to the region and the world. Thus it is our ardent belief that the Human Resource Development Council has its job clearly cut out.
