With $73 Million in Hand, Botswana Starts Showing Its Receipts

By Sam Cooley | October 21, 2026

For the past year, Botswana has been telling diamond buyers, especially younger ones, that their purchases do good. On Wednesday, it got a major line item to point to.

De Beers Group transferred its initial contribution of 1 billion pula (about $73 million) to the Diamonds for Development Fund, a diversification vehicle created under its agreement with Botswana’s government.

The money arrived only after the fund’s governance was in place. Former African Development Bank president Akinwumi Adesina was named chairperson at JCK Las Vegas earlier this year, and a 10-member independent board has since been assembled. The board held its first in-country meetings in Gaborone, Botswana, in September, including a meeting with President Duma Boko.

Botswana’s minister of minerals and energy, Bogolo Joy Kenewendo, called the fund “a strategic instrument for advancing Botswana’s economic transformation.”

Bogolo Joy Kenewendo and Dr Steve Boyes of National Geographic — *Bogolo Joy Kenewendo, Botswana’s minister of minerals and energy, and Dr. Steve Boyes, founder of the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project*

Paired with Okavango Eternal, the De Beers-National Geographic conservation partnership President Bokochampioned in New York last month, this new fund gives Botswana a second answer to a question that’s dogged natural diamonds for a generation: What good does this gemstone actually do?

The answer, increasingly, is that diamonds are also paying for Botswana’s economic diversification: The government is using diamond proceeds to hedge against a downturn in the very market that funds it.

“I see this as essentially seed money for a Botswana sovereign wealth fund,” said Paul Zimnisky, an independent diamond industry analyst. “The idea with funds like these is to accumulate wealth for future generations that may no longer have access to resources that previous generations did. For example, this is what they did in Norway with oil revenue from the North Sea.”

Development Diamonds as Botswana’s economic hedge position

Fiscal arithmetic explains the urgency. Diamonds account for 62.3% of Botswana’s export earnings. About a third of its national revenue comes from natural diamonds. Export revenue of diamonds fell about 29% year over year in the first five months of 2026.

Kenewendo has been blunt about the stakes. In May, she told JCK that an economy reliant on a single commodity is fragile. She described the fund as a product of Botswana’s renegotiation with De Beers, in which the government insisted that a share of diamond profits go toward building the rest of the economy.

While the fund has yet to name specific programs to pursue, it says it is now completing its strategy and business plan, and that it will use De Beers’ contribution to draw in larger pools of private, domestic, and international capital.

The fund echoes the pitch Boko made on Sept. 23 at a De Beers and National Geographic event in New York, where he marked the halfway point of the 10-year Okavango Eternal partnership and announced its second phase. He tied buying a natural diamond to supporting a habitat that spans three different countries: starting with rainwaters of the Angolan highlands, through Namibia, which feed into the Okavango Delta in Botswana.

“Our diamond story is not simply one of extraction,” he noted.

Establishing a new narrative

The extraction story is exactly what Botswana’s government is trying to change. Kenewendo has described the country’s “Development Diamonds” branding as a way to flip the narrative for natural diamonds.

For many younger shoppers, that narrative still runs through the eyes of Solomon Vandy, the Sierra Leonean fisherman enslaved in a rebel diamond camp in Blood Diamond, the 2006 film that made Leonardo DiCaprio the face of the conflict-stone trade. Many of these consumers were probably too young to see it in theaters, but its imagery has endured, reinforced by lab-grown marketing that positions its product as the clean alternative.

The diamond industry’s checkered history is real, but it belongs to specific places and specific wars. Ian Smillie, the Canadian activist who helped build the Kimberley Process, drew that line on JCK’s The Jewelry District podcast in December 2024: In Sierra Leone and Angola, diamonds “weren’t the cause of the problem, but they were being used to pay for it.”

Botswana’s diamond revenue, by contrast, has funded schools, health care, and infrastructure since its 1966 independence.

Smillie also warned then that lab-grown stones could do to diamonds what synthetic amethyst did to that natural semiprecious gem decades ago: “It knocked the bottom out of the natural [amethyst] business, and people who made a living mining amethysts are mostly gone,” he said.

Nearly two years later, with Botswana’s diamond export revenue down 29% so far this year, the Diamonds for Development Fund is the country’s safeguard against over-reliance on a single stone.

Whether that hedge will hold depends on what the fund builds next. For now, it has a chair, a board, finances, but no projects yet.

“The receipt of the initial contribution marks an important milestone for the Diamonds for Development Fund,” said Adesina, its chairperson. “The Fund will now move towards implementation.”

(Photo from the Republic of Botswana’s Facebook page)