27 Oct 2025

As part of government’s commitment to mobilise funding and ensure road network maintenance, tolling will be considered through partnership with the private sector.

In this regard, A1 highway has been identified as a candidate for tolling through Public Private Partnership (PPP) where the investor will recoup their capital investment from toll fees.

Presenting the chapter on for Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure in the draft National Development Plan 12 (NDP 12), Minister Noah Salakae indicated that efforts were also underway to assess the viability of tolling other roads around the country through a feasibility study.

He said Botswana currently relied on 32,500 kilometers network, out of which 10,725 kilometres are tarred, thus admitting that this was not nearly enough and created a bottleneck for other sectors such as tourism, agriculture and mining by limiting production and increasing transport costs.

Minister Salakae said the focus therefore would be on the rehabilitation and upgrading of these roads to not only improve access but also ensure safety for the communities.

“As part of the transformation drive in the transport sector, 2,722 kilometers of roads will be upgraded and rehabilitated during NDP 12. This will increase the current Road Condition Index (RCI) of 65 per cent to more than 75 per cent,” he said.

He stated that some of the strategic roads geared towards facilitating trade were upgrading and reconstruction of the A1 highway, reconstruction of Palapye-Martins Drift, including Martin’s Drift bridge, reconstruction of Dikabeya-Lerala road, development of Tsabong-Hukuntsi Road and Shorobe-Kachikau road as well as reconstruction of Kokotsha-Tsabong-McCathy’s Rust road.

These roads, he said would remove bottlenecks and facilita access for sectors such as tourism, agriculture and mining as well as facilitate connectivity and transportation of people, goods and services in general.

Mr Salakae highlighted the need for a well-developed infrastructure sector to facilitate economic sectors, improve access to key production areas and markets as well as improve movement of goods and services.

He however stated that the sector has been marred by project implementation challenges. Such challenges included amongst others, poor performance of some contractors, inadequate supervision, monitoring and evaluation as well as limited implementation capacity. He said it was therefore government’s intention to ensure that these challenges were addressed.

“To achieve this, we have set our vision as a sector, which is to transform Botswana into a premier regional hub for trade, travel and investment by building world-class integrated infrastructure that ensures resource security, powers sustainable economic diversification and provides seamless connectivity to regional and global markets,” he said.

Mr Salakae said the focus during NDP 12 would be to enhance monitoring and evaluation, which has been lagging and therefore affecting service delivery. ENDS