Minister of Youth and Gender Affairs Honourable Lesego Chombo has notched a significant win with the passage of the National Research and Innovation Council Bill, giving young Batswana a permanent seat at the tables that shape their future.
The newly passed legislation establishes an apex body to oversee and coordinate the country’s research and innovation ecosystem. Working alongside the Botswana Innovation Hub, the Council is designed to support innovation prototyping and commercialisation of youth-led ventures, positioning the country to translate ideas from young innovators into viable, scalable enterprises.
A Deliberate Push for Youth Voice
What sets this Council apart is not only its mandate but who will sit around its table. According to Minister of Youth and Gender Affairs’s counterpart, Honourable David Tshere, this did not happen by chance. “Minister Chombo pushed for this inclusion in Cabinet, and continues to push for it across all legislation appointing boards,” Tshere says.
As a result, the National Research and Innovation Council will permanently reserve two seats for youth under the age of 35. Crucially, this is not a discretionary gesture that could be quietly reversed: the tenure of these youth seats is secured by law. Qualifying candidates will need to possess the requisite skills to serve meaningfully on the Council, ensuring that youth representation translates into substantive participation rather than symbolic presence.
Why It Matters
Young people are consistently at the centre of the country’s innovation and entrepreneurship conversations, yet they have often been absent from the boardrooms where decisions about funding, policy and strategic direction are made. By anchoring youth seats in law rather than convention, this reform insulates youth participation from shifting political will or administrative discretion. Whoever occupies these seats will do so as a matter of legal right, not favour.
For a Council tasked with helping start-ups move from prototype to market, having young innovators, the very demographic the Council is meant to serve, directly represented at board level is expected to sharpen the relevance and responsiveness of its decisions.
The Battle Continues
For Minister Chombo, the National Research and Innovation Council is not the finish line but a proof of concept. Having secured this legislative precedent, she has signalled her intent to continue advocating for youth representation to be replicated across all board formations countrywide, turning what began as a single hard-won concession in Cabinet into a broader national standard for how young Batswana are included in institutional decision-making.
If successful, this campaign could reshape the composition of boards across government-linked entities, embedding youth voice into the machinery of governance well beyond the research and innovation space.