Portal:Botswana

Botswana, officially the Republic of Botswana, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70% of its territory being a part of the Kalahari Desert. It is bordered by South Africa to the south and southeast, Namibia to the west and north, Zambia to the north, and Zimbabwe to the northeast. With a population of slightly over 2.4 million people and a comparable land area to France, Botswana is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. While it is not enshrined by statutory law, Botswana is de facto the nation state of the Batswana people, who constitute nearly 80% of the population while legally undistinguished Kalanga people, who account for another 11%, are the single largest ethnic minority.

The Batswana ethnic group are descended mainly from Bantu-speaking peoples who migrated into southern Africa, including modern Botswana, in several waves before AD 600. In 1885, the British colonised the area and declared a protectorate named Bechuanaland. As part of the decolonisation of Africa, Bechuanaland became an independent Commonwealth republic under its current name on 30 September 1966. Since then, it has been a parliamentary republic with a consistent record of uninterrupted democratic elections, though dominated by the Botswana Democratic Party until 2024. As of 2024^[update], Botswana is the least corrupt country in mainland Africa according to the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International.

Botswana's economy has generally experienced stable growth since independence. It is dominated by tourism and mining; Botswana produces more diamonds than any other country. Its gross national income per capita (purchasing power parity) of about $20,158 as of 2024^[update] (by some estimates the fourth-largest in Africa) gives the country a relatively high standard of living and the second-highest Human Development Index of continental sub-Saharan Africa, after South Africa. Despite this, Botswana continues to grapple with high unemployment and income inequality rates. Botswana is a member of the Southern African Customs Union, the Southern African Development Community, the Commonwealth of Nations and the United Nations. (Full article...)

Dow in 2011

Unity Dow (née Diswai; born 23 April 1959) is a Motswana lawyer, author, human rights activist and Member of Parliament for Kgatleng West since November 2024. She formerly served as a judge on the High Court of Botswana and in various Botswana government ministries. Born in the Bechuanaland Protectorate to a seamstress and a farmer, who insisted on their children obtaining an education, Dow grew up in a traditional rural village before modernisation. She earned a law degree in 1983 from the University of Botswana and Swaziland, though her studies were completed in Swaziland and University of Edinburgh, Scotland, as Botswana had no law school at the time. After her graduation, Dow opened the first all-woman law firm in Botswana and in 1997 became the first woman to be appointed as a judge to the country's High Court.

During her time in law, Dow was involved in three historic cases in Botswana. In 1992, she was the plaintiff in the landmark legal case, Unity Dow v Attorney-General, which ended the gender discrimination in the nation's nationality laws that had previously not allowed children to derive nationality from their married mothers. The case gained Dow international attention and sparked a wave of changes eliminating gender disparity in nationality laws across Africa. In 2006, as the presiding judge in the case of Roy Sesana and Others v. the Government of Botswana, Dow ruled against the government's actions to prohibit the Basarwa indigenous people from living and hunting on their ancestral lands, forcing them to resettle outside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. She ruled that the government had to restore basic services, allow the Basarwa to return to the land and obtain hunting permits, and pay damages to those who had been forcibly relocated if they chose not to return. In 2014, Dow served as legal counsel for LEGABIBO (Lesbians, Gays & Bisexuals of Botswana) in their case to register their organisation with the Department of Civil and National Registration and successfully received a ruling for the government to allow the organisation to be registered. (Full article...)