African Data Revolution: Survey
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A list of registered companies and key data about each company. Open data from company registers may be used for many ends: e.g. enabling customers and businesses to see with whom they deal, or to see where a company has registered offices. This definition draws on the work of OpenCorporates.
| Question | Answer | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Available free of charge | Yes | |
| Downloadable | No | |
| Publicly available | Yes | |
| Openly licenced | No | An excerpt of the website terms says: Any redistribution or reproduction of part or all of the contents in any form is prohibited other than the following: you may print or download to a local hard disk extracts for your personal and non-commercial use only you may copy the content to individual third parties for their personal use, but only if you acknowledge the website as the source of the material. You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content. Nor may you transmit it or store it in any other website or other form of electronic retrieval system. |
| Up-to-date | No | There is no timestamp when companies were last registered. There should be a list of deregistered companies which would indicate that companies are dissolved. But the page does not open (see https://www.cipa.co.bw/list-deregistered-companies). |
| In an open and machine-readable format | ||
| location | https://www.cipa.co.bw/namesearch/ - Interface to search names of companies provided by CIPA | |
| Collected by government | Yes | |
| findable_steps | Searched for company registration data | |
| characteristics | Name of company | The only data that is available online is a name list of companies registered in Botswana |
| Controlled access | Yes | |
| Collector name | Ministry of Trade and Industry, Companies and Intellectual Property Authority (CIPA) | For our assessment we refer to the Companies and Intellectual Property Authority (CIPA), a parastatal mandated by the MITI to register businesses and protect intellectual property rights: https://www.cipa.co.bw/about-us CIPA provides an interface to search names of companies: https://www.cipa.co.bw/namesearch/ There allegedly is an online database of company names under the responsibility of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Botswana, that can be accessed to prevent duplicates, subject to verification by the Registrar of Companies and Intellectual Property (https://www.mtinamesearch.gov.bw/search/). As the database states: "The availability or non availability of a name does not guarantee automatic approaval of the name upon application for name reservation." Data are allegedly available through a search mask so it is necessary to know the name of an entity in order to find it. However, the website does not return any results. |