BOTSWANA’S INFRASTRUCTURE: A CONTINENTAL PERSPECTIVE As of 2008, Botswana faced efficiency issues including under-allocation of resources to the power sector, underexecution of infrastructure budgets, and misalignment of tariffs and costs in the power and water sectors. Over the period 2009/10, the government acted decisively to address these issues, and as a result of sound policy decisions the country has been able to recoup close to $68 million a year that were previously being lost to these various inefficiencies.

As a result, Botswana is perhaps the only African country that faces neither serious efficiency nor funding gaps for infrastructure; an altogether remarkable achievement.

# The continental perspective

The Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD) has gathered and analyzed extensive data on infrastructure in more than 40 Sub-Saharan countries, including Botswana. The results have been presented in reports covering different areas of infrastructure—ICT, irrigation, power, transport, water and sanitation—and different policy areas, including investment needs, fiscal costs, and sector performance.

This report presents the key AICD findings for Botswana, allowing the country’s infrastructure situation to be benchmarked against that of its African peers. Given that Botswana has reached middleincome status and is a resource-dependent economy, two sets of African benchmarks will be used to evaluate Botswana’s situation: Middle-Income Countries (MICs) and resource-rich countries. Detailed comparisons will also be made with immediate regional neighbors in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries.

Several methodological issues should be borne in mind. First, because of the cross-country nature of data collection, a time lag is inevitable. The period covered by the AICD runs from 2001 to 2006 for countries for which data was collected in the first phase of the project. For the countries in phase two, including Botswana, data collection began later. Therefore most of the data for Botswana are from the 2004–08 period. Most technical data presented are for 2006 (or the most recent year available), while financial data are typically averaged over the available period to smooth out the effect of short-term fluctuations. Since the period post 2008 has been particularly eventful for Botswana’s infrastructure sectors, key changes are noted in the text even if they cannot be reflected directly in the data which for the sake of international comparisons must retain a consistent time period.

Second, to make comparisons across countries, we had to standardize the indicators and analysis so that everything was done on a consistent basis. This means that some of the indicators presented here may be slightly different from those that are routinely reported and discussed at the country level. In the specific case of spending needs, achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has been assumed as the social targets. These targets look indeed relatively modest for middle-income countries like Botswana, and therefore the spending needs of the water and sanitation sectors represent a lower bound yet a cross-country comparable spending targets for the country.

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