Africa-Press – Botswana. The Ministry of Youth and Gender Affairs engaged stakeholders on an exercise to review Youth Development Fund (YDF) and Botswana National Service Programme (BNSP).
The purpose of the review exercise was meant to enhance the impact, sustainability and alignment with contemporary youth empowerment needs. Director of Transformation at the ministry, Mr Thebe Mogapi said the review included, but was not limited to major institutional bottlenecks and alignment with contemporary regional and international conventions such as ACFTA, AGOA, Commonwealth, protocols on youth empowerment and development, the country’s strategic national development objectives, as well as the development of a new model.
“This is in view of the fact that, for any youth development strategy in any country to be effective, there must be a systematic reappraisal of all existing protocols for their impact on the youth; whether economic, socio-political, environmental and technological,” Mr Mogapi said.
He also said the review was meant to explore possibilities of partnerships and illustrate their possible roles in the implementation and running of the programme, benchmark and share experiences from other countries. He also said the exercise would review and establish the impact of YDF and BNSP in terms of meeting its current objectives, review the existing guidelines and processes as well as review and recommend the appropriate management structure of the programme and make any recommendations in as far as programme implementation could be improved.
A representative from Youth and gender ministry, Mr Omphitlhetse Tshukudu indicated that the programmes has been running from 2009 and as such they were outdated.
“We are evaluating these programmes to promote relevance and sustainability of enterprises for them to respond to the changing landscape such as technology, and also to establish if the funding level commensurate with the prevailing landscape of inflation and market,” Mr Tshukudu said.
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