Dear Botswana,

Few nations have turned a buried asset into a public one as carefully as you have. Diamonds account for around 80 percent of your exports and a quarter of everything you produce, according to the International Monetary Fund. In February 2025, after seven years of negotiation, you signed a new ten-year agreement with De Beers: your share of Debswana’s sales rises from 25 to 30 percent now, and to 40 percent in the second half of the decade. That is a sovereign asset being repriced in the nation’s favour.

The strengths are real. Nine in ten of you have basic drinking water. Your primary schools had about 24 pupils to every teacher in the last count. The World Bank is financing water security and a programme to accelerate renewable energy and access. These are the foundations a diversified economy needs.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. Sixty-three in every hundred of you lived below $8.30 a day at the last count, in 2015. Fifty-two in every hundred of you cannot always count on enough good food. At the last count, in 2011, fifty-one in every hundred of your children reached the end of primary school unable to read a simple text. Income sets your Coverage today, at 36.8 out of 100, with food and reading close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

The task now is to aim the diamond dividend at the guarantees that hold your people back: care, food and clean power. A larger share of every stone is a revenue stream that can be pledged to outcomes a citizen can feel, in clinics, in fields and on rooftops.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Botswana: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no Motswana falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“Diamonds built the state. Now let them build every basic living standard, one by one.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect Botswana ReDesign Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect Botswana will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.