Botswana, site by site: the regulator, the first measurement, and the record that survives the distance.

The obligations first

WUC zones and the Gaborone prepaid scheme

Botswana runs its water through one utility, which makes the national loss figure — around 45% of production lost, by WUC's August 2026 reporting — a single organisation's balance sheet. The Gaborone prepaid programme puts 35,000 smart meters at the customer end; the measurement that turns it into a loss-reduction tool is at the other end: bulk input per zone against the sum of vends, night flow per district, and an independent reading of the meters themselves. Pages: non-revenue water in Botswana, prepaid meter verification.

Wellfields, village supply and the North-South Carrier

The country's water moves long distances: wellfields in the north and east feed the North-South Carrier towards the population in the south-east, and village schemes hang off boreholes and small reservoirs along the way. Level, flow, pressure and pump status every few minutes, with dry-run protection at the borehole and pressure profiles along the pipeline, is the record that replaces the weekly drive. Pages: water telemetry, remote site monitoring.

Boreholes on cattle posts, farms and lodges

Off the A1 corridor the borehole is the site: a solar pump, a tank, cattle or guests depending on it, and nobody within a hundred kilometres. Tank level and pump current, solar-powered, on private LoRaWAN back to the nearest 4G point, report the empty tank before the animals do. The same node design serves a game farm water point and a lodge's supply.

Diamond mines — Jwaneng, Orapa, Karowe

Botswana's large diamond operations are open pits with underground extensions under way, and their monitoring list is the open-pit list: pit dewatering and groundwater levels against the environmental plan, slope and tailings instrumentation, the power interface between BPC supply and site generation, and the rotating assets — crushers, mills, conveyors, pumps — whose spares come up the road from Johannesburg. Conveyors and pumps are the assets that fail most often and cost the least to instrument. Page: mining condition monitoring in Botswana.

Copper in the Kalahari — Khoemacau, Motheo

The Kalahari Copper Belt in the north-west put concentrators where there was previously no grid, no road worth the name and no technician. Everything the site does is measured against the cost of getting somebody there: mill and crusher vibration, slurry-pump temperature, concentrate flow, power-plant load, water balance for a plant that has to make its own supply. Local buffering and a link that tolerates days without a visit are the design rules. Pages: mining condition monitoring in Botswana; our Africa mine monitoring map puts the Botswana row beside its neighbours.

Coal at Morupule — mine and power station

A coal mine feeding a power station next door has two conveyor systems, a crushing plant and a set of mills whose availability is the country's electricity supply. Belt condition, drive vibration, bearing temperature and stockpile level, continuously, are the difference between a planned belt change and an unplanned national one.

Beef — feedlots, BMC abattoirs, cold chain, LITS

Botswana's beef exports run on traceability: every animal carries an RFID ear tag under the Livestock Identification and Trace-back System, and the abattoirs in Lobatse and Francistown depend on cold rooms that must stay cold through the shedding window. Continuous temperature logging with alarms, door and compressor state, genset readiness for the cold chain — and, for the feedlot and the yard, the same RFID reader classes that read the ear tags read trailers, tools and equipment at the gate. Page: generator and power monitoring; regional context in our Africa RFID applications map.

Beverage and FMCG lines in Gaborone

The Gaborone industrial areas host the filling, packing and processing lines where micro-stops and changeovers are the ordinary loss physics and a scheduled outage is the extraordinary one. Count-based OEE at the constraint attributes the first; mains presence and genset state beside the counts attribute the second. Our named client relationship in this sector extends to Botswana. Pages: OEE and production monitoring, industrial IoT in Botswana.

Factories and works discharging under BOS 93

BOS 93 is the limit table a Botswana discharge is judged against — pH 6.0–9.0, BOD 30 mg/L, COD 75 mg/L, suspended solids 25 mg/L, faecal coliforms 1,000 per 100 mL in the 2004 values reproduced in the regional handbook; the current 2021 edition is sold by BOBS — and the Department of Water Affairs issues the permit. Flow, pH and a COD surrogate at the outfall, continuously, catch the shock load before it becomes a permit finding. Page: effluent discharge compliance.

Generator sites, telecom shelters and BPC shedding

When BPC schedules shedding, the genset is a production asset, and on an unattended site fuel is one of the largest operating costs. Mains presence, genset state, fuel level and run-hours, buffered locally and reported over 4G or LoRaWAN, explain the fuel bill, catch the theft and prove the set ready before the window. Page: generator and power monitoring in Botswana.

Safari lodges and Okavango camps

A camp in the Delta is an off-grid industrial site with guests: solar and battery, a genset, boreholes, cold rooms and a sewage plant whose discharge is judged in a wetland. Battery state of charge, genset fuel, water level and cold-room temperature on one screen, reported over whatever link the camp has, replace the radio call that comes too late. Page: remote site monitoring.

Instrumented plant — reading what is already there

Most Botswana plants already have the sensors: 4–20 mA transmitters, Modbus meters, a PLC with spare capacity. The fastest project reads those into a dashboard and an alarm path without replacing anything, and adds sensors only where the record has a gap. Page: industrial IoT in Botswana.

The map on one table