QR check-ins and digital travel permits for Botswana’s COVID-19 response.
During the early months of the pandemic, Botswana needed a faster way to understand how people were moving across the country and where potential exposure risks were emerging. Many entry points still relied on paper logbooks, which made it difficult to process travel permits, access movement records quickly, and coordinate tracing efforts at scale.
As part of the startup product team supporting the national launch, I helped translate user needs into product workflows for QR check-ins, permit applications, and public registration. I also worked across feedback, usability issues, and launch readiness so the product could support broad public use across different levels of device access.
Problem
How might Botswana replace manual mobility logbooks with a faster, more secure system for travel permits, check-ins, and exposure tracking?
Outcome
BeSafe onboarded 1.4M users nationwide, reduced permit approvals from days to minutes, and replaced publicly accessible paper registers with digital check-in flows that were easier to coordinate at scale.
From paper records to national QR check-ins
Phase 1: Product requirements
Translated public-health and user needs into workflows for travel permit applications, QR check-ins, and registration across web and mobile access points.
Phase 2: Launch readiness
Worked with engineering and product stakeholders to improve registration flows, accessibility, text rendering, and location-related usability issues before and during launch.
Phase 3: Adoption feedback
Gathered feedback from app reviews, contact-center reports, and beta users to identify friction points, prioritize fixes, and guide product improvements during rollout.
Takeaway
This project taught me how product decisions change when a tool has to work for an entire country, not just a narrow user segment. The biggest lesson was learning to balance speed, accessibility, privacy, and public trust while translating urgent policy needs into workflows that ordinary people could use quickly.
From paper registers to QR check-ins
The launch replaced physical visitor registers with a QR-code registration flow for service-point check-ins and permit access.
