Road safety due to animal-vehicle collisions (AVC) is one of the major problems in the transportation sector. Fences are now worn out and cannot effective keep animals from the roads. Most accidents occur at night especially for divers under the influence. Warning signs are static and continually warn drivers even if there may be no animals ahead, which has desensitised their appeals to driver alertness. Currently, people are hired to deter livestock from the roads but this is only effective onsite as they can cover one area at a time. All this is evidenced by the annual MVA reports. The AVC trend is almost static which may suggest that the current solutions have reached their utmost to mitigate accidents.

Traffic congestion is one of the pressing issues in Gaborone. One of the major limitations is unreliable power supply due to frequent power cuts which renders any programmed controllers ineffective and drivers have to resort to basic junction traffic flow rules, leading to adverse congestions. Most importantly, the traffic controller programming are on static timings regardless of time of day, traffic count, or even priority lanes. Ultimately, police officers have been deployed to key traffic junctions for congestion mitigations. By observation, they are quite efficient but this deprives the Police Department of the necessary resources to attend to more pressing issues. Moreover, they can only help when the weather permits, or at specific times who do not necessarily attend to all possible congestions. The implementation of ICT and Electronics to a transportation system is termed Intelligent Transport System (ITS).

Coal is an abundant natural resource in Botswana and is mostly used for the generation of electricity. In an attempt to expand coal’s versatile uses, this section also focuses on coal to liquid technologies (CTL) a process referred to as coal liquefaction. This allows coal to be utilized as an alternative to oil, where it is converted to liquid fuels (hydrocarbon based). To date, CTL research in Botswana is almost non-existent. Therefore, we are setting up a pilot plant for coal pyrolysis with the goal of value addition. This emphasizes on rapid heating of the coal with the possibility of coal to liquid fuels. The set up is still at the initial stage and expected to be fully operational by the end of the year.