African Development Foundation

A United States Government Agency

helping rural communities in botswana play the stock market

 

 

Project	Location	Funding Level	Funding Period
Botswana Agricultural Union Small Stock Project	Letlhakeng, Botswana	$250,000	FY 2004-2008

When it achieved independence in 1966, Botswana was one of Africa’s poorest countries. Since then, its economy has enjoyed the world’s highest average annual growth rate. The discovery of rich mineral deposits in the early 1970s made Botswana the world’s leading producer of diamonds and generated capital reserves that the Government of Botswana (GOB) has invested in a comprehensive program for national development.

But not all of Botswana’s 1.7 million citizens have derived significant benefits from their country’s economic transformation over the past four decades. More than half of all Batswana [1] live in rural areas and rely on subsistence farming and the raising of small stock animals – goats and sheep - for their livelihood. While Botswana has the second-largest commercial beef herd in sub-Saharan Africa, cattle ownership remains heavily concentrated among a small set of wealthy families. Just 10 percent of the population controls more than 60 percent of the national herd.

By contrast, ownership of the country’s estimated three million sheep and goats is fairly evenly distributed across rural households. Goats and sheep are often called “the poor man’s cattle” because small stock are less expensive to purchase, they require less maintenance, and they have feeding behaviors, disease resistance features, and heat tolerance characteristics that make them well suited to thrive in the hot, arid conditions that prevail along the fringes of the Kalahari Desert. Goats provide poorer families essential protein through meat and milk, and they have the potential to generate significant income for rural farmers who have access to marketing networks.

Programs that support small stock owners are thus essential to enhancing the food security and income-earning potential of thousands of women-headed rural households that lack the essential labor power required to own and manage larger livestock. For more than a century, the attraction of cash wages in the mines and urban areas of South Africa has encouraged more than 50 percent of rural men to abandon traditional family cattle posts and take up long-term employment hundreds of miles from home. Over time, this situation has forced poorer families to sell their larger stock and concentrate their efforts on more manageable subsistence enterprises.

This situation has encouraged Botswana’s Assistant Minister for Agriculture, Pelokgale Seloma, to urge rural Batswana to increase their investments in small stock raising because tending goats and sheep can “play an important role in raising income levels and food security of many households.”

To help rural households connect with marketing networks, ADF is providing the Botswana Agricultural Union (BAU) with funding to establish a small stock marketing center in Letlhakeng, a remote village 150 kilometers northwest of Gaborone. The goals of the new marketing center are to:

• provide up to 1,000 local households with a vital point of sale for their animals, which will attract large-scale commercial buyers of goat meat and goat milk for Gaborone’s growing population,
   
• deliver higher profits to rural small stock producers through negotiated pricing agreements that circumvent exploitative middlemen,
   
• create a community-owned and community-led trust that will assume independent management of the new marketing center, and
   
• design an effective model for community-based marketing trusts that can be replicated across rural Botswana.

BAU is a national farmers’ organization that represents more than 27 individual farmers’ groups across the country. With technical assistance provided by ADF’s Botswana partner organization, Action for Economic Empowerment Trust (AEET), BAU will help local farmers acquire the financial management and marketing skills they need to assume day-to-day control of the marketing center under a newly established non-governmental organization (NGO), the Motlhware Village Trust (MVT). MVT will ultimately assume direct ownership of the Letlhakeng site in the final year of the three-year project.

It is expected that annual commercial sales of small stock will more than triple over the period of the grant and that earnings for local farming families will rise accordingly, to more than more than two million pula (US $413,000). It is also expected that the new marketing center will achieve full profitability by the end of the grant period and generate enough earnings to finance site maintenance and support the employment of a full-time staff.

[1] In Setswana and other Bantu languages, singular, noun declensions are indicated with prefixes rather than suffixes. Therefore Botswana indicates the nation of Botswana while Batswana is a plural that indicates the people of Botswana, or the larger group of Setswana-speaking peoples who live across contemporary southern Africa.

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