Botswana’s SMEs face challenges relating to productivity, management capability, access to appropriate business development services and the ability to compete effectively in domestic and wider markets. For a financing initiative such as the proposed Two-Step Loan, it was important to understand these capability gaps and determine what complementary support SMEs would require to make effective use of financing.
IED provided consultancy support to JICA as part of the preparatory work for the SME Promotion Two-Step Loan Project to the Government of Botswana. IED was part of a consortium of international consultancy firms engaged to undertake the assignment. The work included an SME survey and a capacity-development needs assessment designed to understand the challenges, capabilities and support needs of local businesses.
IED contributed practical enterprise-development expertise to the assessment and helped identify appropriate interventions that could strengthen SME performance, productivity and competitiveness. Based on the findings, recommendations were developed around appropriate capacity-development and Business Development Services (BDS) interventions to complement access to finance.
The assignment reached businesses and institutions across Botswana. Up to 150 SMEs and large-scale companies across the country were interviewed as part of the assessment, providing a broad picture of the financing, capacity and business-development needs of enterprises. The assignment also involved engagement with key institutions within Botswana’s SME financing and enterprise-development ecosystem, including the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Trade and Entrepreneurship, Local Enterprise Authority (LEA), Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency (CEDA), Botswana Investment and Trade Centre (BITC), Botswana Development Corporation (BDC), National Development Bank (NDB), commercial banks, among other relevant stakeholders.
The consultancy generated evidence on the capacity and development needs of Botswana’s SME sector and contributed to recommendations for a more comprehensive SME support model combining finance with capacity development and Business Development Services.
As part of the assignment, a two-day capacity-building workshop on Kaizen and other Business Development Services was piloted and hosted at IED. The workshop brought together the participating stakeholders and provided an opportunity to translate the findings of the assessment into practical capacity-development interventions.
The pilot demonstrated how the proposed SME support model could move beyond access to finance by combining financing with practical business-development and productivity-enhancement support.
IED is looking forward to the actual roll-out of the Two-Step Loan project and to seeing the recommendations and capacity-development interventions move from the preparatory and assessment stage into implementation. The assignment has given IED valuable insight into the needs of Botswana’s SME sector, and the Institute looks forward to contributing its enterprise-development expertise as the project progresses into implementation.