With its first P1 billion in hand, Botswana’s new Diamonds for Development Fund sets out to convert a nation’s mineral fortune into something more durable than stones: industries, enterprises and jobs for the generations the gems leave behind.
For nearly six decades, the arithmetic of Botswana’s prosperity has been written in carats. Diamonds pulled a landlocked, drought-prone country out of the ranks of the world’s poorest at independence and built the schools, clinics and tarred roads that followed. Now, as the richest kimberlite pipes age and global demand for rough stones wobbles, the country is placing a deliberate wager on the question that has shadowed its success all along: what happens when the diamonds are no longer enough?
The answer, increasingly, has a name and a balance sheet. The Diamonds for Development Fund – D4D, in the shorthand already taking hold in Gaborone’s policy corridors – has received its initial P1 billion contribution from De Beers Group, a milestone that moves the newly minted institution from the realm of intention into the business of deployment.
The money is less a windfall than a mandate. Established through a partnership between the Government of the Republic of Botswana and De Beers Group, the Fund has been charged with a task that is at once simple to state and formidable to execute: to transform the wealth dug from Botswana’s soil into diversified, productive and sustainable resources – the kind that keep generating value long after the last profitable stone has been recovered.
A fund built to outlast its source
The strategic posture emerging from D4D is unapologetically catalytic. Rather than function as a passive endowment, the Fund intends to crowd in investment, nurture enterprise, widen the country’s narrow export base and, above all, manufacture jobs in an economy where formal employment has never kept pace with the ambitions of its young population.
That direction was sharpened over a series of strategy and stakeholder engagements during a September visit to Botswana by the Fund’s Board of Directors, led by its Chairman, Dr. Akinwumi A. Adesina, the former President of the African Development Bank. The sessions were threaded, by design, with a distinctly Botswana ethic – therisanyo, the Setswana principle of leading through consultation, dialogue and shared understanding before action.
“We came to Botswana above all to listen, and then to act on what we learn,” Dr. Adesina said. “Transformational work cannot be achieved in isolation. Diamonds for Development will bring together Government, business, financial institutions, industry and development partners to turn high-potential opportunities into investable projects.”
It is a telling choice of verb. The gap between a “high-potential opportunity” and an “investable project” is precisely where so many African diversification dreams have gone to die – stranded for want of structuring, patient capital or the credibility to draw in private money. D4D is positioning itself in that gap, as the institution that de-risks, packages and convenes.
A generational clock
Dr. Adesina, who steered the African Development Bank through two terms between 2015 and 2025 – growing its capital base from 93 billion to 318 billion and launching an Africa Investment Forum that has mobilised more than $225 billion in investment interest – is not a man given to modest timelines.
“Our mandate is generational,” he said. “We exist to help economically viable businesses and sectors across value chains and regions deliver diversification and long-term employment, aligned with Botswana’s National Development Plan 12 and the Botswana Economic Transformation Plan.”
The anchoring to NDP 12 and the Economic Transformation Plan is more than bureaucratic courtesy. It signals an intent to fold the Fund’s ambitions into the state’s own development machinery rather than run in parallel to it – a recognition that catalytic capital works best when it marches in step with national policy rather than around it.
And then came the line that will likely outlive the press release that carried it: “Diamonds built Botswana’s past. Through the Diamonds for Development Fund, they can help build its future too.”
The weight of a name
If the money is the proof of concept, the board is the proof of seriousness. D4D has assembled a roster that reads less like a domestic committee than a continental investment house.
Alongside Dr. Adesina sit figures with reach well beyond diamonds. Dr. Anne Jorun Aas – a nuclear chemist by training, a seven-year McKinsey alumna, and now chief executive of the agritech traceability firm FarmForce – brings the renewable-energy and smallholder-agriculture fluency a diversifying economy covets. Ms. Kathleen Kallot, founder of the Nairobi-based sovereign data and AI company Amini and a veteran of NVIDIA, Arm and Intel, carries the imprimatur of the TIME100 and a seat at the frontier of African artificial intelligence. Ms. Monhla Hlahla, who ran Airports Company South Africa through its 2010 World Cup build-out and chaired Royal Bafokeng Holdings for twelve years, supplies four decades of infrastructure and development-finance muscle.
The diamond world is represented in depth. Ms. Alessandra Berridge, De Beers’ Executive Vice President for Commercial and Partnerships and formerly its Group General Counsel, and Mr. Paul Rowley, whose four-decade De Beers career began as a trainee sorter in 1983 and included the landmark migration of the company’s sales function from London to Gaborone, bring the institutional memory of the industry that made the Fund possible.
And the Botswana state is woven firmly through it. Ms. Grace Sekwababe, a senior Ministry of Finance official and former Deputy Accountant General, and Mr. Jacob Thamage – architect of the Okavango Diamond Company and the man who steered Botswana’s Kimberley Process implementation from 2002 to 2016 – ground the board in local fiscal and mineral-policy reality. Mr. Thapelo Tsheole, chief executive of the pan-African exchange Afrinex and former head of both the Botswana Stock Exchange and Rwanda’s capital markets authority, completes a bench conspicuously heavy on the plumbing of capital markets – the pipes through which investable projects must eventually flow.
From stones to sinew
For all the pedigree, the test ahead is unforgiving. Botswana has talked about diversification for as long as it has mined diamonds, and the mineral’s share of the economy has proved stubbornly difficult to dislodge. Downturns in the global diamond trade still ripple straight through the national budget, a vulnerability that has only sharpened the urgency behind D4D’s launch.
What distinguishes this attempt, its backers argue, is the combination of serious money, an independently governed structure, a board with the convening power to summon private capital, and an explicit alignment with the country’s own transformation blueprints. Whether that is enough to turn a mono-economy into a diversified one is the open question of the coming decade.
For now, the Fund speaks the careful language of a project still assembling itself – promising to “strengthen its strategy, partnerships and institutional capacity through sustained engagement with the people and institutions it exists to serve.” Translation: the hard, unglamorous work of structuring deals has only just begun.
But the ambition is clear, and so is the stakes-defining logic beneath it. A country built by extraction is betting it can be rebuilt by investment; that the same stones which lifted Botswana out of poverty can, converted into enterprises and employment, keep it standing when they run out. The first billion pula is on the table. The rest of the story is Botswana’s to write.
