# Dear Botswana

- Link: https://perfectnations.com/dear-botswana/
- Published: 2026-10-12T23:19:04-05:00
- Author: Preeti Sinha

[The Botswana blueprint](https://perfectnations.com/blueprints/botswana/)

Perfect Nations® · Letters to the NationsBotswana

# 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.

Yours in design,

**Preeti Sinha**

President and CEO, Perfect Nations

Sources: [World Bank, 2015](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.UMIC?locations=BW)·
[FAO, 2024](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SN.ITK.MSFI.ZS?locations=BW) · 
[World Bank, 2011](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.LPV.PRIM?locations=BW)·
[World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/country/bw)

 [Enter the ReDesign Studio](https://perfectnations.com/blueprints/botswana/#bp-studio)
[Read the Botswana blueprint](https://perfectnations.com/blueprints/botswana/)