Information Sources for Public Policy Making in Botswana

Abstract

This article identifies and discusses information structures for public policy making in Botswana. It shows that information structures for public policy making can be divided into institutions, documents and people namely items in; registries, libraries, central statistics office, staff’s own documents and personal contacts. Registries are used a lot by government officers for their routine tasks and sometimes systemic activities. Other information sources are meetings, seminars, workshops, or conferences; followed by radio and television, and then library items such as books. The paper concludes that information structures such as institutions, documents and people which include information sources like registries, libraries, research units in government departments and indeed other information structures provide hard and soft information within government and where possible out-with government, and add value to public policy formulation. However some deficiencies were identified such as lack of training and lack of relevant materials. It was then recommended that there is need to train staff working in government structures such as registries and libraries as well as an improvement of the materials found within the structures to make it more relevant to policy making.