Botswana

Botswana has a modern, recently overhauled data protection regime. Its current instrument is the Data Protection Act, 2024 (Act No. 18 of 2024), passed by the National Assembly on 29 October 2024 and brought into force on 14 January 2025, which repeals and replaces the Data Protection Act 2018. The 2018 Act had faced repeated implementation difficulties and enforcement gaps, and the 2024 Act was designed to modernise and strengthen the framework in closer alignment with the GDPR. It applies to processing in Botswana and extends extraterritorially to controllers and processors outside the country that offer goods or services to, or monitor the behaviour of, individuals in Botswana. The Act imposes the full set of principles (lawfulness, fairness, transparency, purpose limitation, minimisation, accuracy, storage limitation, integrity and confidentiality) and grants data subjects comprehensive rights: access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection to automated decision-making and profiling. Controllers must notify the supervisory authority within 72 hours of a breach posing a risk to data subjects, special categories (health, biometric, genetic, racial origin, children's data) attract heightened protection, and certain controllers must appoint Data Protection Officers. Maximum administrative fines are set at BWP 50 million or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher, a steep increase from the 2018 Act's BWP 10 million ceiling. Enforcement rests with the Information and Data Protection Commission, the independent supervisory authority, whose powers were substantially enhanced under the 2024 Act to include search, seizure, and detention, fixed-term commissioner appointments, and statutory independence from the Minister. Cross-border transfers require adequate protection or appropriate safeguards such as standard contractual clauses or binding corporate rules. With a freshly modernised statute, strong penalties, and an empowered regulator, Botswana operates one of the more robust frameworks in its region on paper.