Bogolo Kenewendo is the founding president of Kenewendo Advisory, former Minister for Trade, Investment and Industry of Botswana. Bogolo led the Brexit trade negotiations on behalf of southern African nations and was a member of the UN high-level panel on digital cooperation. 

We discuss the African Continent Free Trade Area that was signed the 1st of January, the kind of questions her advisory company is being asked to work on, what benefits and challenges has COVID brought to the continent of Africa, and what was discussed at the high-level UN panel o digital cooperation, such as regulating and legislating digital firms, and how they had to add a statement in the report saying that “views on privacy and security differed sharply”.

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• UN panel - talking about online technology while we need to talk about infrastructure on the continent of Africa. We need to start the conversation with ICT infrastructure as well as policy infrastructure  and be accommodative to technology that already exists on the continent
• African infrastructure: we can have laptops, but how will we charge them? Multilateral institutions need to invest in infrastructure.
• What are the enabling technologies emerging in Botswana and the south African region and what are the technologies that are more damaging?
• Mobile penetration continues to increase, and internet connection - and this means access to information.
• UN panel & regional differences:  it was mainly a lack of understanding and having the information of how things really are. Why is there hesitation towards a laissez-faire
   approach on regulating digital phones on the continent and what can be some of those challenges in regulating them?
• A bigger disagreement was around what is the right approach around regulating and legislating digital firms - do we just let them be and the free market will have that invisible hand or we ensure ourselves that there's the right regulation, that taxes are put in place.
• People do not see the fourth industrial revolution as a natural evolution of efficiency ( as was done with the second and third) there will always be a challenge in change and how things are done. Just toning down the language around technology can be a start, we are not communicating what will be the differences and changes and how they impact people’s lives.

Next week we’ll hear from Tony Curzon Price, Senior Advisor to the UK Cabinet Office, working for the Prime Minister. Our topic is: "Tools, Machines and Populism"

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