Taazima Kala, FCIPR, Chart.PR, is a strategic communications and reputation management specialist based in Gaborone, Botswana. As General Manager and Chief Consultant of Hotwire, she has spent more than a decade advising organisations across Africa in the areas of reputation, stakeholder engagement, public affairs, crisis communications and communications strategy.
She is the first professional from Botswana to be admitted as a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, chairs the CIPR International Committee, is a member of the CIPR Influence Editorial Board and the Forbes Agency Council, and is an author and one of the key voices behind the Africa Communications Report. The column below was originally intended as an interview in which she talks about the current state of PR and communications practice in Botswana, a market that draws on deep traditions of dialogue while entering a new phase of digital, professional and AI transformation.
Current State of PR and Communications Practice in Botswana
I’ll admit there’s something I quietly enjoy about the look of mild surprise when I tell colleagues at international conferences that I’m based in Botswana. They expect a market on the margins. What they don’t expect is a country with over 81% internet penetration, a median age of 23, and a communications culture with roots that run far deeper than most of the profession’s current thinking about “authentic dialogue”. These are concepts Botswana has been practising in structured form for generations.
The Setswana language itself is built around communicative principles: Bua (speak), Therisanyo (consult), Dipuisanyo (dialogue). At the centre of every community sits the Kgotla, a traditional gathering governed by botho, mutual respect, accountability, and the understanding that every voice holds equal validity. Mafoko a kgotla a mantle otle: everyone has a say, and their say matters. That is, almost word for word, the definition of strategic PR. The global profession keeps arriving at these principles through research and calling them new. In Botswana, they were the founding architecture.
The PR industry here is young in its formal sense. Botswana has a professional home in the PRISA local chapter, but participation remains limited, and many organisations still conflate PR with media relations. Conditions are shifting. ESG pressures, stakeholder scrutiny, and a new generation of business leaders who understand reputation are changing the conversation. Across Africa, corporate reputation management is the second fastest growing area in PR, with an expected growth rate of 10%. Botswana is part of that story, and the best of what this market can contribute is only beginning to be understood.
The Media Landscape: Reach and Influence
Do not assume the digital playbook that works in Nairobi or Lagos will land here. Radio remains the most popular news source, used regularly by two-thirds of citizens. Social media reaches 47%, ahead of television at 41%, online news at 36%, and print at just 29%. A digital-first strategy reaches a meaningful audience, but misses the medium with the broadest and most consistent trust.
Radio in Botswana is not a nostalgic medium. In a country where 26% of the population is rural, it is live, participatory, and rooted in call-in culture and local language programming. It is, in many ways, the modern Kgotla, a space where community dialogue happens openly. Social media users have grown to 1.3 million adults, representing 82% of the adult population, and WhatsApp functions as the primary news ecosystem for many Batswana. Families and workplaces operate as informal dikgotla, spaces for shared information and collective sense-making.
Print is under real pressure, reflecting a regional pattern. South Africa recorded a 17% year-on-year decline in newspaper circulation during 2024. Yet independent digital platforms are emerging, run by small teams with strong community followings. That is restructuring, not collapse. It also creates more interesting editorial relationships for communicators willing to invest in them early.
The Biggest Challenges, and What They Open Up
Ntwa kgolo ke ya molomo: the greatest battles are fought with words, consultation, and engagement. Every challenge here contains an opportunity.
A fragmenting landscape. No single channel dominates across demographics or geographies. For campaign designers, that is genuinely complex. Yet communicators who learn to build integrated strategies develop a rigour that single-channel markets rarely demand. Thinking carefully about which channel reaches which community with which message is simply therisanyo applied to modern media.
Shrinking newsrooms. Revenue pressures have reduced the number of working journalists. At the same time, independent digital voices with deep community followings are filling that space. Some of my most substantive editorial conversations now happen with these new voices. Relationship building has to start earlier and become more personal. That is exactly what dipuisanyo requires.
A noisier information environment. With mobile connections equivalent to 166% of the population, unverified content can spread through WhatsApp and become accepted fact before communications teams have responded. This is not a technology problem. It is a trust problem. When HIV devastated Botswana from the mid-1980s, behavioural change did not happen through broadcast campaigns alone. It happened through the Kgotla, with trusted community leaders helping people change behaviour. The principle still applies. Trust built before a crisis becomes a community’s greatest asset during one.
A closing, but real, digital access gap. Botswana now has 98.2% 4G coverage and 41.9% 5G coverage, but data costs continue to limit access in some rural areas. With government investing significantly in digital connectivity and Starlink changing rural access, the question is no longer whether the next wave of connected citizens is coming. It is whether organisations are ready for them. They will bring the same expectation for dipuisanyo, genuine dialogue, that has always defined our culture.
Professionalisation lagging ambition. This is the challenge I feel most personally. The PRISA chapter provides a foundation but has not yet reached the scale needed for strong professional standards, continuous development, or a clear practitioner pathway. Across Africa, 22% of PR professionals identify the perception and value of PR as the profession’s greatest challenge. As Sir Seretse Khama said, “A nation without a past is a lost nation.” The same applies to a profession. Given that Botswana already has therisanyo embedded in governance and botho embedded in society, we have the opportunity to build a genuinely distinctive model of African communications excellence.
AI: Tool, Threat, or Too Early to Call?
Primarily a tool, meaningfully an enabler, and occasionally a genuine source of anxiety, sometimes in the same week.
At Hotwire, we use AI for media monitoring, research synthesis, content drafting, and competitive intelligence. The efficiency gains are real. More than half of communications professionals globally now use generative AI to draft elements of press releases, and 71% believe AI will be very important to the profession’s future. Yet AI excels at synthesis and pattern recognition. It is far less capable of judgement. It cannot know which angle resonates with a particular journalist, which tone feels wrong for a specific community, or what sits beneath a stakeholder’s question. In a market where relationships matter deeply and cultural nuance is central, that human layer is indispensable. You cannot automate botho. You cannot train a model on therisanyo.
Media and communications professionals rank first among occupational groups in terms of AI exposure. Yet the tasks most affected are routine production. If your value lies in strategy, relationships, and trusted counsel, AI makes you faster, not redundant. Two-thirds of Gen Z PR professionals believe AI will benefit the industry, while a quarter worry about its impact on entry-level roles. Both views are probably right.
The more interesting question is what AI does to trust. If audiences increasingly assume that content is machine generated, demonstrable human authenticity becomes one of the profession’s scarcest assets. A culture built on oral tradition and participatory dialogue is not threatened by AI’s ability to generate content at scale. It is distinguished by it. Our culture has always asked a different question. Not “how much can we produce?” but “does this genuinely mean something to the people it is meant to reach?” There is no algorithmic answer to that. In a world saturated with generated content, it may become the single most valuable question communications professionals can ask. I would rather Botswana help shape how AI enters our profession, grounded in our own values, than adopt models designed for very different contexts.
