NBFIRA & Statistics Botswana sign a Memorandum of Understanding
The Non-Bank Financial Institutions Regulatory Authority (NBFIRA) and Statistics Botswana signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Wednesday 15th March 2017 at Masa conference center.
The Memorandum of Understanding serves to enhance cooperation, formalize partnership and collaboration between the two organisations. It will help define and guide working relationships in addition to enabling the smooth exchange of financial institutions supervision and statistics information, for good policy and decision making. This collaboration will help equip NBFIRA and Statistics Botswana with insight on issues of common interest such as positioning Botswana in terms of economic development.
During the signing ceremony the Statistician General (Ag) Dr. B. Mguni said that the partnership celebrated on that day is directed towards the need to work closely with other entities in the production of statistics to enhance decision making processes as well as planning so to provide a clear framework for the two parties aimed at improving the quality of data collected.
“It is my commitment and that of the Statistics Botswana that we shall do all we can to assist and share information required by NBFIRA, depending on its availability. I need to however point out that this data exchange protocol has to be in accordance with the provisions of the different Acts, in particular the Statistics Act provides for confidentiality and protection of the data providers”. Said Dr. Mguni
In his remarks, NBFIRA CEO Mr. Oaitse Ramasedi highlighted that, “It is in this manner that all of us would probably agree that the spreading of risk via new and sophisticated financial techniques and instruments is, in principle, positive for the financial system, insofar as it reduces the likelihood that such risk would be concentrated in, or more on, the financial institutions sector of the economy.
“Furthermore, the dispersion of risk makes it more difficult when you don’t have statistics to qualify and validate it, conversely Statistics Botswana’s effort to collect data becomes impossible without data from sectors regulated by NBFIRA, hence the reason for this agreement with Statistics Botswana” said NBFIRA CEO Ramasedi.
NBFIRA CEO highlighted that the Authority participate in the SADC financial inclusion agenda which touches on financial participation and that can be achieved by statistics to determine whether as a country we are making progress, thus giving insight on issues of common interest such as continuing viability of sector data in order to protect consumers of financial services. It will also assist in determining the market size of regulated entities and their contribution to our country’s GDP and determine the sector growth.
