Botswana’s new government: key challenges, according to data

I’ve lived in a single country for the majority of my life (Zimbabwe), and every time election season comes by, the nature of conversations around politics rarely leans into data. There’s a lot of frustration from those opposing the people in power and a lot of rebuttals from those in power claiming progress is being made—but both sides rarely make their claims using numbers/data. 

It’s a curious phenomenon that became clearer to me during Zimbabwe’s election last year. I largely felt that way observing South Africa’s election this year and now too with Botswana. It appears as though to get to the numbers or evidence-based conversations - you have to wade through an endless swamp of sloganeering.

With this said and given what’s currently happening in Botswana - i.e the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) which has been booted out after nearly 6 decades in power by the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) party - we decided to go through data and identify i) the negative trends the incoming government will need to reverse and ii) the positive trends they’ll need to maintain from the previous regime along with...

What has to change? Well, politics is a start…

Since we are doing this because of the election season we might as well start in the political domain where Botswana desperately needs more women representation in their politics. We looked at the share of seats held by women in national parliaments and Botswana is woefully behind its peers and the regional average. In Southern Africa, women on average held 26% of seats in parliament as of 2023. This is already a low number but in Botswana, it was even lower at 11.1%. Back in 2009, Botswana was only worse than Comoros in this regard in SADC and since 2020 they have been outrightly the worst in the region.