Botswana has pushed harder against human trafficking than it did a year ago, yet it remains stranded short of the baseline the world has set for itself, hobbled by thinning budgets for the very programs meant to shield victims and forestall the crime, according to the 2026 Trafficking in Persons Report released by the United States Department of State.
The report keeps Botswana on Tier 2, a designation that credits a government for mounting a serious campaign toward the minimum standards for eradicating trafficking while acknowledging, plainly, that it has not arrived.
The portrait it paints is of a country that is at once a source, a destination, and a corridor. Traffickers prey on Batswana and foreigners alike within the country’s borders, the report finds, even as Batswana themselves are carried abroad and exploited. Women, children and migrants remain the most exposed to sex trafficking and forced labour.
Increasingly, the lure arrives by phone. Traffickers now dangle counterfeit promises of work overseas across social media, the report notes, before funnelling their victims into agriculture, domestic servitude and the commercial sex trade. In the cattle country of the west, the exploitation is older and more direct. “Cattle ranchers, particularly in Ghanzi district, exploit children in labor trafficking,” the report states.
Behind the camp fence, and across the border
Some of the report’s gravest findings gather at Dukwi Refugee Camp in the Central District, home to 914 refugees and asylum-seekers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Tanzania and Ethiopia, among other nations. Hemmed in by restrictions on movement, starved of schooling and shut out of any real livelihood, the camp’s residents are rendered easy marks, the report warns. Child refugees are reportedly drawn into sex trafficking in the camp’s orbit, with foreign truck drivers passing through Botswana named as regular buyers.
The document reaches beyond the country’s own vulnerable, too. It flags roughly 80 Cuban workers tied to the Cuban regime who were present in Botswana, cautioning that Havana may have subjected them to forced labour. Bilateral labour agreements that keep the Cuban government as a middleman, the report argues, can strand professionals in a limbo of confiscated wages and arbitrary punishment.
A second, darker allegation traces a longer line. Citing media and non-governmental organisation accounts, the report says Russian officials and illicit recruiters have fraudulently drawn young women between the ages of 18 and 22 from Africa – Botswana among the named sources – as well as South Asia and South America, under the guise of vocational training, only to install them in military drone-production facilities. There, workers are said to endure hazardous conditions, surveillance, violated hours and wages, rewritten contracts and recruitment fees extracted from their own pockets – a catalogue of red flags the report reads as the fingerprints of human trafficking.
Measurable gains, and their limits
Against that backdrop, Washington credits Gaborone with genuine momentum. Botswana sharpened its enforcement, victim identification and training over the reporting period. It won its first trafficking conviction in four years, identified and steered more victims toward help, and schooled a substantial cohort of officials in spotting victims and wielding the law. It also enacted labour legislation to fortify worker protections and choke off forced labour.
“The government expanded the number of offices of their Directorate of Public Prosecution (DPP), an agency that retains a number of specialized prosecutors on staff, and increased the number of specialized officers in the Botswana Police Service (BPS) Anti-Human Trafficking Unit. However, the government did not meet the minimum standards in several key areas.”
The ledger of cases tells its own cautionary tale. Botswana investigated four trafficking cases during the period, prosecuted a single suspect and secured one conviction – a step back from the five investigations and two prosecutions logged the year before. The convicted trafficker drew 15 years in prison. Three investigations and seven prosecutions carried over from earlier periods remained unresolved.
The government disclosed no investigations, prosecutions or convictions of public officials suspected of complicity, the report observes, and did not join other governments in cross-border enforcement operations. Even as the BPS anti-trafficking unit added officers, its investigators still contended with too few hands, too little specialised expertise and too little money to operate nationwide. The DPP, for its part, widened its reach, planting prosecutors devoted to trafficking cases in Maun, Selibe Phikwe, Palapye, Kasane and Tsabong.
More victims found, thinner nets to catch them
Botswana also identified and referred more victims for care – nine in all, every one steered toward assistance, against three the previous year. One had been exploited through forced labour; the forms of trafficking that ensnared the other eight went unspecified.
Yet the safety net beneath those victims remains frayed, particularly for foreigners. Although foreign nationals were entitled to the same services as citizens — safe shelter, medical care, psychosocial counselling, legal aid and help returning home voluntarily – the government kept no formal policy offering legal alternatives to deportation for those who might face reprisal or ruin back home. Nor did it order restitution to victims as part of criminal sentences.
On prevention, Botswana held together an inter-agency task force and pressed ahead with its 2023–2028 National Action Plan against human trafficking. But the money behind that effort collapsed, sliding to P696,610 – about US$56,000 – from P2.57 million, or US$188,375, the year before. The government sustained public-awareness campaigns with an international organisation, aimed at vulnerable communities in high-risk zones, ran an anti-trafficking hotline and moved to dampen demand for commercial sex.
How the scorecard works
The State Department sorts countries into four tiers by the vigour of their governments’ efforts against the minimum standards – not by the sheer scale of trafficking within their borders. Those benchmarks track the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, which supplements the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.
By the report’s own account, Botswana’s Anti-Human Trafficking Act, as amended, criminalises both sex and labour trafficking and casts the definition wide enough to capture all forms of child labour. The law carries prison terms of 15 to 30 years and a fine of P500,000; a trafficker unable to pay faces an additional three to five years behind bars. Washington judges those penalties sufficiently severe and, for sex trafficking, on par with the sentences for crimes as grave as rape. The government has also implemented the 2014 Anti-Trafficking Act regulations meant to steer judges and prosecutors.
For all the statutes on the books and the stepped-up enforcement, the report closes on a sober note: Botswana still has ground to make up in its investigations, its protection of victims, its cooperation across borders and, not least, the money it is willing to spend to stop the crime before it starts.
