Description:
Infrastructure made a net contribution
of just over two percentage points to Botswana's
improved per capita growth performance in recent years.
Raising the country s infrastructure endowment to that of
the region's middle-income countries could boost annual
growth by about 1.2 percentage points. Botswana has made
significant infrastructure progress in recent years,
spanning the transport, water and sanitation, power, and
mobile telephony sectors. But the country still faces a
number of important infrastructure challenges. The most
pressing is in the power sector, where the country is
economically and financially exposed to a lack of generation
capacity and insufficient power supply, leaving the economy
vulnerable to power price shocks and load shedding.
Botswana's international transport connections and
Internet connectivity also lag behind those of comparable
countries. Botswana's overall resource envelope of $800
million per year surpasses its $785 million needs estimate.
Nevertheless, it loses $68 million a year to inefficiencies
and faces a funding gap of $305 million per year, entirely
in the power sector, traceable to the quality of spending
decisions. Botswana will be in a good position to meet its
infrastructure goals if it can reduce inefficiencies,
increase public-sector receipts, and attract more public funding.