Consumer Watchdog is a division of Business & Enterprise Solutions Botswana (Pty) Ltd, a privately owned company registered in Botswana and based in Gaborone.
With newspaper columns in both the national daily newspaper Mmegi and the country's best-selling newspaper The Voice every Friday, as well as a blog, Consumer Watchdog has a wide reach regarding consumer issues in Botswana.
Originally set up in 2005, Watchdog has the following ambitions:
- To campaign for legislation to protect the consumer
- To represent consumers and advocate on their behalf
- To make service providers in Botswana accountable
- To educate consumers about their choices, their rights, their responsibilities
Services delivered by BES, the parent company of Consumer Watchdog, include customer service training, organisational review and mystery shopping.
On 31 May 2007, Consumer Watchdog celebrated its second birthday party, with His Excellency the President of Botswana Festus Mogae as the Guest of Honour. 180 customer service champions were celebrated in front of the president, the press and the people.
Consumer Watchdog representatives have worked widely with companies in Botswana and southern Africa, including major banks in Botswana. They also work with the government, insurance companies, retail outlets and restaurants.
Famous quotes containing the word consumer:
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)