Botswana 101: The Country

So, this probably should have been the first post in my Peace Corps journey… oops.

I feel like a little info about the country itself would be helpful to whoever is reading this as you follow along my 2-year journey.  If you are like me, you don’t know much about Botswana (at least I didn’t until I came here.  All I knew is that it was in southern Africa).

So, here’s a few facts and figures about Bots, Wikipedia style:

Location:  Just above South Africa.  Namibia to the left, Zimbabwe to the right, Zambia to the north.

Climate: Mostly desert- the Kalahari Desert.  More temperate in the south and east (if you look at a map, that’s where the greatest population of people live.  Not a coincidence.)  Okavanga Delta in the north.

Population: About 2 million.  And half of them are under the age of 30.

Languages:  Setswana and English.  Although English is the ‘National’ language, most people prefer to speak Setswana, which is a Bantu language.  Various other languages are also spoken by various tribes/villages throughout the country.

Economy: Diamonds.  And cattle.  There are 3 million cattle in this country, so more cows than people.   Diamonds fuel the economy since the government owns 50% of the mines.  Cows fuel peoples’ day to day lives and are the sign of wealth.  Cows > bank accounts.

Biggest strengths:  Peaceful, uncorrupt government.  Amazing use of diamond mines to build infrastructure of country.  Good healthcare system.   Lots of animals and tourist possibilities in the north.  More than 25% of the country is game reserves to give animals spaces (animals = lions, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, gemsbok, hippos, rhinos, hyenas, wild dogs, cheetahs, jaguars, elephants.  Coming for a safari yet?)

Biggest challenges:  2^nd highest HIV rate in the world, I’ll expand on that below.  Not much private economy.  The diamond mines are slated to run out in 10-20 years, which means the country needs to switch its economy to other things.  Very high unemployment.  25% employed outside of their own cattle herds and farming lands.  Lack of accountability in government and in jobs in general. Alcohol abuse.

HIV:  The epidemic is driven by many things, including alcohol, multiple concurrent partnerships, low condom use, low circumcision rates, intergenerational sex, transactional sex, etc.  In some places 50% of women of childbearing age are HIV positive.  Currently the government provides free anti-retrovirals to all patients that need it.  Peace Corps is in the country through American PEPFAR, the presidents emergency plan for AIDS relief, which funds other Bots HIV programs as well.

History:

Botswana is known as the success story of Africa.  It was never an official colony, but rather a British protectorate.  This has good and bad results: it’s avoided some of the worst results of colonization and post-colonial rule (see: race in South Africa, violence in D.R.C, ethnic clashes in Nigeria, anarchy in Somalia, genocide in Rwanda, etc.).  But it also didn’t get the infrastructure build-up that say, Kenya and South Africa did.  So when it became a country in the 60s, there wasn’t much to start with.  Then they found diamonds.  Lots of them.  And unlike almost everywhere else in Africa, this resource did not curse them, but was put to good use by a functional government.  And the government built roads, schools, and hospitals.  It wired the country for electricity and cell phones, and set up piping so that water is drinkable straight from the tap in most places (you need to travel the developing world to realize how freaking rare drinkable tap water is outside of the US and Europe). It got more than 90% of its kids in school and provided free healthcare.  It provided food for a lot of the country that had no way to provide for itself.  It did really cool things with that diamond money.  It got upgraded to middle income country status.

                The aftermath of that is mixed.  Botswana has some of the best infrastructure in Africa.  It also has a population that is used to relying on the government for almost everything, and therefore private industry is rather stalled.  The biggest challenge facing Botswana now, in my opinion, is getting its population to work in private industry.  The infrastructure is there, it just needs businesses and manufacturing, so it’s not importing most goods from South Africa and can employ its people.  Personally, I think this is an even bigger challenge that the HIV epidemic, which many see as the greatest challenge.  It’s not a competition though, I feel like a country can work on two problems at once.   I’ll go into development issues more in another post.

                Botswana did well enough in development that the Peace Corps, which had been in the country since 6 months after independence, left.  There was a mutual agreement that PC wasn’t really needed anymore, and volunteers could be better used in other places.   They left in 1997, and returned at the request of the Bots president in 2003 to address HIV/AIDS.  So currently all 135 of us in Bots are doing HIV related activities/programming.    Some of us feel like economic volunteers would be more useful, or at least as useful as HIV volunteers, but that’s another post as well.

                So that’s Botswana in a nutshell.  Come visit me!