Consumers – Digital Marketing & Social · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · Global Issue · June 2026

The gap is familiar to anyone who has watched a new technology arrive in Gaborone ahead of the skills to run it. Capital and tools move first; the people who can operate them follow, often by months or years. A wave of AI investment and digital tooling is now widening that gap globally, and the response, for many local operators, is a skills product rather than the technology itself.

For Botswana, where the economy still leans on diamonds and beef and is trying to diversify into services, the demand signal is clear. When firms adopt digital tools faster than their staff can absorb them, training becomes a market of its own – and one a small operator can enter without the capital that mining or manufacturing demands. The shortage is not the software. The shortage is the person who knows what to do with it.

The demand is downstream of the tools

Every cycle of AI investment seeds a parallel need: someone has to learn the software. That downstream demand for skills products – short courses, certifications, practical workshops – tends to outlast the hype around any single tool. Tools change yearly; the appetite to understand them does not. For a Gaborone training provider or an independent tutor in Francistown, the opportunity is to sell competence, not novelty, and competence does not go out of date when the next product launches.

The pattern repeats at every layer of the economy. A BURS-registered SME adopting accounting software, a Maun lodge installing a booking system, a government office moving a service online – each creates a small, durable demand for someone to teach the people who must now use it. Aggregated across the country, those small demands form a market large enough to build a business on, and one that grows each time another organisation digitises.

When tools arrive faster than skills, the lesson becomes the product.

A services play Botswana can actually run

Unlike diamond beneficiation or beef processing, online education needs little fixed capital and few imports. A laptop, a curriculum and reliable connectivity are most of the kit. That lowers the barrier for small Botswana operators to build something exportable across SADC, where the same skills gap exists in every capital and the same English-language and digital habits often apply. A course built once can be sold many times, which is the economics a small market needs.

The realistic constraint is connectivity and payment friction, not ambition. Course completion depends on data costs and on whether a learner in Maun or Kasane can pay in Pula without a card. Those are solvable problems, and solving them – through mobile-money checkout, downloadable content, or partnerships with local providers – is itself a competitive edge over a foreign platform that ignores them. The operator who removes friction the global player overlooks wins the learner the global player cannot reach.

Low capital, high reach: skills products travel further than the tools they teach.

Keeping the money in Pula

Every imported online course is a small outflow of foreign exchange. Multiply that across thousands of professionals upgrading their skills and the leakage becomes material to a small open economy where the Pula and the Bank of Botswana watch external balances closely. A domestic skills sector reverses that flow – content made in Botswana, sold to Botswana learners, with the spend retained at home.

That is import substitution dressed as a course catalogue, and unusually for import substitution it has an export tail. The same material, once built and proven locally, can be sold across the region as the gap repeats in every neighbouring market. A domestic cost can become a regional earner.

Locally made training keeps the spend at home and can later sell abroad.

The risk is generic content sold from elsewhere

The threat to a Botswana provider is not a shortage of demand but competition from large foreign platforms selling generic courses cheaply. Their weakness is relevance. A course that uses a Botswana payroll, a BURS deadline or a CEDA application as its worked example serves the local learner in a way imported material never will, and that relevance is something scale alone cannot copy.

That local specificity is the moat. There is also a quality-control risk: a market that fills with low-value certificates erodes employer confidence and devalues the credential for everyone. The provider who builds for the Botswana context, and whose certificate employers actually recognise, is harder to displace than one competing on price against global scale. Credibility, not catalogue size, is what a small market can defend.

Generic courses compete on price; local ones compete on relevance, and win.

The Botswana read is straightforward. The country does not have to manufacture the AI to benefit from it. It can sell the understanding of it – to its own workforce first, then to the region – keeping the spend in Pula rather than exporting it to a foreign platform. In a diversification story long on plans and short on services exports, online education is one of the few products a small operator can build this year and sell next, while the skills gap is wide enough to make the building worthwhile.

Sources: arXiv