Botswana’s world digital competitiveness up two notches

Botswana’s digital competitiveness rankings have slightly improved moving two notches up from position 63 to 61, with a competitiveness index score of 48.25 out of 100, where a total of 63 economies were assessed. This year’s rankings were two economies fewer than expected.

According to the Institute for Management Development (IMD) World Digital Competitiveness Rankings, this is an improvement from last year’s rank of 63 out of 64 economies assessed with a competitiveness index score of 33.004 out of 100.

The report quantifies the capacities of 63 global economies to adopt and explore new digital technologies used to transform government practices, business models, and society in general. The rankings and scores in the report are based on a country’s performance in three factors, namely knowledge, technology, and future readiness.

Under the knowledge factor, Botswana ranks 55th with a score of 47.46 while under the technology factor Botswana ranks 59th with a score of 37.77, and under the future readiness factor, Botswana ranks 61st with a score of 37.13.

While Botswana’s overall top strengths lie in talent, adaptive attitudes, and IT integration, concentrated in foreign highly-skilled personnel, smartphone possession, and privacy protection by law content, its overall top weaknesses are mainly in technological framework. Along with the technological framework weaknesses, the breakdown within this subfactor includes mobile broadband subscribers, internet users, internet bandwidth speed, and high-tech exports. Botswana’s leading strength is, paradoxically, also its weakness in the training and education subfactor in which total public expenditure on education ranks highest in the first position, whereas higher education achievement ranks very low at position 61.

Further, the knowledge factor assesses intangible infrastructure, which underlines the process of digital transformation through the discovery, understanding, and learning of new technologies. Unfortunately, Botswana still ranks poorly on the availability of high-tech patent grants, which attained a rank of 61st in this year’s report.

The technology factor observes the overall context in which the development of digital technologies is enabled. There have been some improvements in the availability of scientific research legislation. Improvements were also realised in the development and application of technology from 64th to 49th and the funding for technological development from 63rd to 51st.

Though improvement for the future readiness factor was noted in the adaptive attitudes and IT integration subfactors, business agility went on a decline. Its worst-performing subfactor – technological framework – under the technology factor still saw some improvement. “Botswana needs to intensify efforts to improve the performance of this factor as the country still ranks poorly on internet bandwidth speed at position 63rd, percentage of high-technology exports 62nd, and regulations for starting a business 61st (under the regulatory framework subfactor).

“Future readiness assesses the degree of technology adoption by government, business, and society, in general. Under this factor, Botswana is ranked 16th on smartphone possession and 27th on privacy protection by law content.

The privacy protection by law content indicator captures the extent of the legal framework to protect the privacy of internet users. “There have also been improvements in the rankings on the use of big data and analytics and public-private partnerships. Nonetheless, the country is still challenged in the agility of companies, e-government, and government’s cybersecurity capacity,” found the report. However, the 2022 IMD World Digital Competitiveness Report strongly encourages governments to invest in digital training and education, research and development, cybersecurity and protection, as well as competitive e-government services. These aspects are considered key towards creating digitally competitive economies. The report also highly emphasises the importance of cybersecurity and indicates that protection encourages the adoption and diffusion of digital technologies. It is highly recommended that Botswana works at improving these aspects to fasttrack the achievement of the digitalisation priority of the Reset Agenda.

Though Botswana improved, albeit rather a lower ranking, it was Denmark, the United States of America, Sweden, Singapore, and Switzerland that made the top 5 of the IMD World Competitiveness rankings.