Where traders go for answers: Inside the Botswana Trade Portal
TEMO DONALD NTAPU | Monday October 26, 2026 12:22
Anyone who has tried to export from Francistown or bring machinery in through Tlokweng knows the routine: phone calls, queues, a good deal of guessing, and days gone before a single product has moved.
The Botswana Investment and Trade Centre (BITC) developed the Botswana Trade Portal to cut the red tape and ease doing business. Import and export procedures, regulatory requirements, tariffs and duties, documentation, standards: it all sits on one platform under one roof. The portal also doubles as a Trade Facilitation Enquiry Point, so a trader who can’t find something can simply ask.
The right information. From the right source. At the right time. In a format businesses can understand and use.
Nobody should lose days working out which permit applies, which office to visit or where the form lives.
Botswana is in good company
None of this is a new idea. When the WTO’s Trade Facilitation Agreement came into force on 22 February 2017, its very first article was about transparency: governments must publish trade rules promptly, put them online and name an enquiry point. A UN guide to building national portals calls a single central repository the most effective way to meet that obligation, with step-by-step guides to each procedure at its centre.
Africa already has numbers to show. Kenya halved the steps and time needed to register coffee consignments and took $230 off the cost for traders. Registering with the plant health inspectorate went from ten steps to five, and from fourteen days to six.
Rwanda switched its portal on in 2018, complete with market analysis tools, information for each border crossing and a helpdesk. Uganda’s holds 348 procedures and 227 forms. Costs fall once procedures are visible, and small and medium enterprises feel the difference most.
Why this matters here
Botswana is land-linked, so whatever time and money get spent on paperwork travel with the goods all the way to market. The cost of trading, in other words, is a competitiveness question, not just an irritation. The WTO describes trade facilitation as simplifying, modernising and harmonising import, export and transit processes. Customs posts are only one piece of that.
What the portal really offers is predictability. An importer can check the rules before cargo leaves its country of origin. An exporter eyeing a new market can find out which standards and certificates apply before spending a thebe. Someone planning a factory can build around procedures they actually understand.
A portal that listens
Here is the part BITC finds most interesting. Each enquiry is a small piece of evidence. The same question arriving again and again probably means a procedure is unclear. A request for clarification points to a gap in information, and a complaint about delays points to a bottleneck somewhere. Added up, the enquiries show where doing business in Botswana actually hurts.
So the aim has shifted. Answering the trader is the start; BITC also wants to know why the question came up, and then to take what it learns to the relevant institutions. It will not take over from the regulators. Its job sits in the middle, helping businesses read the regulatory environment and giving the agencies a clearer picture of what businesses experience.
Part of a bigger job
The portal sits alongside the rest of what BITC does: courting investors, helping local firms find export markets, smoothing the way for anyone who wants to set up or expand here. All of it runs into the same wall when the rules are murky.
Unclear requirements put investors off and slow exporters down. Clear ones do the opposite. No single institution builds a predictable trading environment. Businesses ask, agencies answer, and everybody learns something along the way. As answers get easier to find, more firms can get on with what they are good at, which is how an economy gets bigger.
Got a question about permits, standards, documentation or procedures? Try the Botswana Trade Portal at www.botswanatradeportal.org.bw
*Ntapu is the Executive Director Export Development and Promotion at the Botswana Investment and Trade Centre (BITC)