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Today, I want to tell you about one of Africa’s richest countries that you’ve never paid attention to.

It has a GDP per capita of over $20,000, a democratic system that’s lasted hundreds of years, and a wealth fund built on diamonds.

Can you guess the country?

Read to the end to find the answer.

It was landlocked, dry, and boxed in by two of Africa’s most violent colonial regimes.

It was also one of the poorest countries on earth, with a GDP per capita of $80. 

This is the kind of place economic experts write off.

But soon after its independence in 1966, geologists found diamonds under it.

For most of Africa, a valuable rock in the ground is where the real tragedy starts. 

It funds the coup and pays for the war. It makes a few men rich and leaves everyone else poorer than before.

The opposite happened in Botswana; diamonds built the country. 

Today, it has one of the highest incomes per capita in Africa, with a GDP per capita of $22,000 when adjusted for purchasing power parity.

But while the story of Botswana’s growth starts with diamonds, it’s only one piece of the plot. 

Let’s start with how little there was to work with.

At independence in 1966, Botswana had a total of 22 university graduates and 100 secondary school graduates, for a population of 578,000.

It had roughly 12 kilometres of paved road.

There was almost no industry. Most people lived off cattle, or off the wages of men who left to work in South African mines.

The British had run the place as an afterthought. 

For years, they even governed it from a town that sat outside its borders.

Then, in 1967, came the announcement of a diamond find at Orapa. It turned out to be one of the largest diamond reserves in the world.

A poor country had just been handed a fortune. The only question was what it would do with it.

Seretse Khama, Botswana’s first president, made an early choice that shaped everything after.

Working with the finance minister, he went into a joint venture with De Beers, the world’s largest diamond mining company.

At the time, Botswana didn’t know how to mine its own diamonds. So it made De Beers a deal.

Together, they set up Debswana in 1969 in a 50-50 partnership, allowing De Beers to mine and cut diamonds while the country got half the output.

This put the country’s mineral wealth in the hands of the whole nation. 

This single detail was pivotal.

The Orapa Mine opened in 1971, and the richer mine at Jwaneng came later.

In no time, diamonds made up close to 90% of the country’s exports and a big slice of government income.

In 2024, Botswana exported $2.74 billion worth of diamonds, making it the world’s 9th largest diamond exporter.

As it got richer, the money went straight into developing the county.

It built roads, clinics, and classrooms. Botswana made primary school free and built health posts across the country.

You can read the result in the numbers.

The average person in Botswana is richer than a person from Albania, Moldova, Armenia, or Ukraine (even before Russia invaded it in 2014 and 2022).

Income per person sits above $20,000 dollars in purchasing-power terms, the fourth highest on the continent.

Ordinary people got richer, not only the people at the top. 

But besides a pivotal piece of paperwork, something else made Botswana a resource success.

There’s a saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But sudden wealth also corrupts similarly.

In most places, a sudden fortune buys a political machine with the leader at the top. 

The leader pays his friends, the friends guard and support the leader, and everyone outside the circle waits for a turn that never comes.

This is called a Closed Access Order.

Botswana built something closer to an open order. Power was shared out, not locked up.

Before democracy hit Africa, Botswana already had it.

Tswana communities ruled themselves by running a public meeting called the kgotla. 

An ordinary man could stand up in it, argue with the chief, and at times overrule him.

So, power here was never for one man to pocket.

There was a habit of being answerable to a room full of people baked in the culture. 

When the diamonds came, that habit held.

The country ran real elections and let the courts work. For years, it was rated the least corrupt state in its region.

Today, the country has the highest democracy score in Africa, with a 7.73 out of 10.

In the end, it’s all about systems.

It would be tidy to stop there. Make good deals, build good institutions, and beat the resource curse. The end.

But the truth is, it’s not a linear or clear-cut path.

Botswana got lucky in ways a country cannot simply decide to be.

Its diamonds sit deep inside hard rock. They needed big firms and heavy machines to reach them.

The diamonds could not be scooped out of riverbeds by hand, the way fighters did in Sierra Leone. The geology itself made the loot hard to steal.

It dealt with one main partner in De Beers, not a crowd of fifty. 

It has a small population of about 2.5 million today. It already had those old democratic assemblies built into its history.

So “just build good institutions” is true, but it’s also an advantage Botswana always had.

Some of what saved Botswana was inherited, and some of it was the very nature of the resource that made it rich.  

But here’s the thing.

We’ve talked about how Botswana avoided the resource curse.

But there’s a more sinister one called the Dutch Disease, and it’s sneaking up on Botswana.

It’s when you earn so much from one product that nothing else can compete. 

The currency stays strong, and wages stay high, and your farms and factories never get going. You become very good at one thing and are unable to do anything else.

Botswana has not beaten this one. Sixty years in, it is still mostly a diamond economy.

And now, the bill is due. 

Diamond prices have dropped, partly because lab-grown stones now sell for a fraction of the old price. 

The economy shrank in 2024 and shrank again in 2025. 

Foreign reserves have slid from about $7.5 billion in 2017 to $3.8 billion by 2025.

This is where the famous comparisons help, and also trip people up.

Norway, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all handled their resource money well. 

But managing the money well and escaping the dependence are two different wins. Norway is the only one that truly built a second, lasting fortune on top of the first. 

The Gulf states, fifty years on and far richer, are still trying to stand on something other than oil.

So the bar Botswana is being measured against is one that almost no country has cleared.

But this isn’t to say that the country isn’t looking to beat the Dutch Disease, too.

In fact, it’s making a lot of effort.

In 1994, Botswana set up the Pula Fund, one of the first sovereign wealth funds across Africa. 

The idea was borrowed from Norway: save the diamond money so it lasts longer than the diamonds.

The idea was right. The discipline was not.

The fund’s rules were loose, and through the downturn, the government has been spending it down fast.

So in 2025, the country tried again. It launched a new $4 billion fund built for development rather than just savings, alongside a $27 billion plan to grow other industries.

The bets are outside the familiar territory of diamond mining:

Norway is its north star. Every oil dollar the country earns flows into its fund, and the government may spend only the returns, never the savings.

The way out of Dutch disease is boring, which is exactly why it is hard.

You build the rest of the economy while you still have resources to pay for it. You start before the resource fades, not after.

Botswana is doing this a bit later than most, but it’s doing it.

It still has working institutions, a strong cultural advantage, and a solid growth plan that has worked in similar countries.

And tech is one strong arm of this plan.

Its innovation hub is already proving to be a melting pot for companies, foreign university campuses, and research labs.

Startups in the hub are already building impactful technologies like SolarEar, a low-cost hearing aid that uses solar power, and Brastorne, which connects off-grid, rural populations to essential digital services.

These are small companies, solving real problems, in a country that built the conditions for them to exist.

And that's the point. Botswana didn't just find diamonds. It built a place where what comes after the diamonds can grow too.

What do you think about Botswana’s story and its plan for its future?

→Tell me here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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