29 May 2022

Botswana’s realisation of the digital transformation agenda requires an ecosystem of applications and services that will help to achieve it, President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi has said.

He was speaking in a recent interview following talks with American satellite company, Planet Labs chief executive officer, Dr William Marshall on the sidelines of the just ended World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Dr Masisi underscored Botswana’s desire to partner with the company for exploitation of its satellite technologies across different sectors of the economy. He said partnership with Planet Labs, which operates the highest known frequency satellite data, would assist Botswana with needed expertise to attain its digitalisation agenda. He said the use of advanced technologies such as those offered by the company were important for attainment of digitalisation as one of the priorities of the Reset Agenda.

“We want to exploit the use of technology and digitalisation for efficiency in different sectors of the economy, be it agriculture, health or overall governance,” he said. For his part, Dr Marshal said his

company specialised in satellite data that helped with a wide array of applications as well as services for improved digitalisation in developing countries. “There is massive opportunity for digitalisation in developing countries than developed ones,” he said.

He added his company was ready to partner with Botswana to assist the country to realise its digitalisation agenda and to act as a showcase for other African countries. Dr Marshal said the use of

satellite technologies would improve efficiency in agriculture, tourism and ecology, among others. Meanwhile, the acting chief executive officer of Botswana Digital and Innovation Hub, Mr Tshepo Tsheko said his organisation played a crucial part in mobilising innovators in the country and linking them to opportunities that could help them to develop products and services for export to the world.

Speaking in an interview at the end of the forum, Mr Tsheko said the establishment of Botswana Hackathons, a collaboration of computer programers, who was meant to leverage government’s digitalisation agenda. ‘We will be partnering with Planet Labs, which seeks to make their technology available to support academia, research and start-ups to plug into the platforms that develop solutions to enable e-commerce and e-transactions as well as to support agriculture innovation among others,” he said.

He expressed optimism that solid action items would come out of the Davos meeting as some conversations that were held as far back as 2019 were now being implemented. BOPA