Botswana's National AI Policy — Built on a UNESCO Readiness Assessment, Not Yet Finalised

In June 2025, UNESCO's Regional Office for Southern Africa rolled out its Readiness Assessment Methodology (RAM) — a structured tool covering legal, social, scientific, economic and technical-infrastructure dimensions of AI preparedness — across six Southern African countries, with Botswana and Malawi named as the first to complete high-level expert consultations, led on the Botswana side by the Ministry of Communications and Innovation.

According to the Ministry, the RAM exercise verified Botswana's readiness for AI adoption 'in terms of methods, inclusivity, security, and alignment with the national development aspirations,' and its findings have directly fed into a National AI Policy that Assistant Minister Shawn Ntlhaile described in 2025 as in its 'final stage' of drafting, alongside complementary cybersecurity-governance and digital-services frameworks. The government has signalled it wants the eventual policy to support domestically built AI applications addressing local priorities such as livestock technology, climate modelling and indigenous language processing.

This is a readiness and policy-design story, not yet an operational deployment: as of the assessment, no completion date for the policy had been published, and no measured public-value outcomes exist yet, since the RAM diagnoses institutional and infrastructural gaps rather than evaluating a live system. Academic commentary on Botswana's AI-readiness landscape independently notes that the country's research and skills base (via institutions such as BITRI and BIUST) remains at an early stage relative to policy ambition, a gap the National AI Policy is explicitly meant to help close.

Read the full analysis: https://dailynews.gov.bw/news-detail/88106