Estonian company shares its experience in Botswana and the role Estonians play in building the country's digital government

One such partner is the IT company Cybernetica. They highlight how Estonia’s approach to secure data exchange and digital infrastructure is key to creating sustainable, long-term impact in Botswana.

Based on Estonia's digital experience, Cybernetica's message to Botswana is clear: build a solid foundation before focusing on the visible layers. Although many countries often want to start by creating apps or portals, a service built on weak data inevitably inherits those weaknesses. Estonia's e-services work because the underlying registers are reliable, the owner of each dataset is clearly known, secure identifiers are used, and the state follows the once-only principle, meaning data is asked from citizens one time and reused across services. Therefore, the primary recommendation is to direct initial funding specifically towards data quality, management, and integration, making all subsequent development steps significantly more cost-effective.

Cybernetica's experience clearly demonstrates why Estonian IT companies are such strong partners for implementing large European Union digital development projects in Africa. Estonia started from a situation that many countries there recognize today: limited budgets and human resources, fragmented registers, and paperwork running in parallel with the first digital systems. Because Estonia digitized gradually and largely did the work itself, Estonian companies bring invaluable experience of operating under similar constraints. For example, Cybernetica has played a central role in designing the X-Road and in creating and managing Estonia's national information systems. They have already successfully applied this very same experience elsewhere in Africa, such as in Namibia.

Botswana's digital transformation strategy had singled out several priority initiatives, including an innovative e-residency concept. While all of them mattered, the main question came down to which ones were ready for investment right now. Cybernetica was brought in to conduct this independent assessment. Their team ran structured workshops with system operators, from agency leadership down to technical teams. Each initiative was evaluated against uniform criteria: readiness, tangible impact, and feasibility.

The outcome, however, extends beyond just the assessed initiatives: it provided a framework that will help guide future investment decisions without always having to start from scratch.

A longer case study can be found on Cybernetica's website.