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Diamonds for Development’s blueprint to manufacture jobs
Aubrey Lute（https://weekendpost.co.bw/author/alute/） 3 hours ago 235 12 min
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.”