Botswana bets its diamonds on a future beyond diamonds

President Duma Boko welcomes a new fund chaired by Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, aiming to wrench the country’s economy away from mineral dependence and toward lasting structural growth.

The diamonds beneath Botswana’s red earth have built roads, hospitals, and one of Africa’s most stable democracies. They have also built a trap. For decades, the country’s fortunes have risen and fallen with the price of a single commodity, a boom-and-bust rhythm that keeps the nation wealthy on paper but vulnerable in practice.

On Wednesday, President Duma Boko moved to spring that trap.

Boko received Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, the newly appointed chair of the Diamonds for Development Fund’s board, for a courtesy call at the presidency – a meeting that was polite in form but pointed in substance. The fund, a strategic economic vehicle established by the De Beers Group in consultation with Botswana’s government, exists for one reason: to make diamonds a bridge to a diversified economy, not the economy itself.

“We have a lot to do in very little time,” Boko told Adesina, a line that landed less as bureaucratic small talk than as a quiet acknowledgment of how narrow the window for structural reform has become.

The urgency is not abstract. Botswana’s diamond revenues have underwritten its post-independence success story, but the geology is finite and the market is fickle. Every year that the country’s growth plan reads “more diamonds” is a year borrowed against an uncertain future.

Adesina, the former president of the African Development Bank and one of the continent’s most recognisable voices on economic transformation, seemed to absorb that urgency. He described the fund’s ten-member board as a roster of “highly capable business leaders” fully aligned with the national vision – a carefully chosen phrase that signals the fund intends to operate less like a charity and more like an investment engine.

What makes the Diamonds for Development Fund different from the usual parade of development initiatives is its architecture. Rather than disbursing grants into the sand, the fund plans to build investment portfolios aimed at three sectors that have long been undercapitalised in Botswana: youth, infrastructure, and agriculture. It will deploy risk capital and repayable grants to support viable small and medium enterprises and private-sector growth – tools that treat entrepreneurs as assets, not aid recipients.

Adesina was explicit about the philosophical anchor. The fund’s approach, he said, would be rooted in kgotla dialogue and the spirit of Therisanyo – the traditional Botswana practice of communal consultation, where decisions emerge from consensus rather than decree. It was a striking inversion: a fund backed by one of the world’s largest mining companies, invoking the oldest democratic tradition in southern Africa to chart a post-mining future.

“Poverty shouldn’t be our future,” Adesina said. “Our vision is to transform Botswana’s economy to enable major structural growth.”

The sentence is simple. The math behind it is not. Botswana has a per-capita GDP that places it in the upper-middle-income bracket, yet unemployment, particularly among the young, remains stubbornly high. The diamond wealth has not translated into a knowledge-based economy at the scale the country needs. The fund’s promise is to close that gap, not with handouts, but with the kind of patient, risk-tolerant capital that private investors typically avoid and governments cannot always sustain.

Whether the fund delivers on that promise will depend on the quality of its bets, on whether its risk capital finds the entrepreneurs who can scale, and whether its repayable grants create the kind of enterprises that outlast the diamond era. Boards, no matter how capable, do not build economies. They make decisions. Execution is what matters.

But the symbolism alone is worth noting. Botswana is a country that has long understood the paradox of its own wealth: it is rich because of what lies underground and vulnerable because of what does not yet exist above it. The Diamonds for Development Fund, at least on paper, is an attempt to resolve that paradox, to turn the glitter of extraction into the grit of construction.

Boko, for his part, welcomed the fund’s swift action in setting the development agenda in motion. When a president says there is “very little time,” it is usually because the clock has already been running longer than anyone cares to admit.

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