BIDPA’s three-decade record traces how a nation’s policy questions evolved – and why the hardest ones still lie ahead.

SIXTY YEARS ON, BOTSWANA GRAPPLES WITH THE QUESTION THAT HAS ALWAYS HAUNTED IT:

WHAT COMES AFTER DIAMONDS?

On 30th September, Botswana turns 60 – a diamond jubilee in more than name. For six decades, the country has been sub-Saharan Africa’soutlier: a democracy that converted one of the world’s richestdiamond endowments into sustained economic growth, macroeconomic stability and, for a stretch, the continent’s highest per-capita income.

But anniversaries invite taking stock, and a new publication from the Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis makes clear that the stock-taking is sobering. In a compendium called “60 for 60” – 60 research works for 60 years of independence – BIDPA has assembled a kind of institutional autobiography in evidence form. Taken together, the studies trace not just the arc of one think tank’s working life but the shifting preoccupations of a country that has long understood its miracle to be fragile. The overarching story is this: Botswana’s policy questions have never stood still. They moved from building, to competing, to diversifying, to asking who benefits, to demanding structural transformation. And now, as the country enters its seventh decade, the questions are harder than ever; and the tools for answering them may need to change as radically as the questions themselve

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