19 May 2024

Botswana remains determined to climb the Human Development Index (HDI) rankings for the betterment of the quality of life of every citizen.

Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr Lemogang Kwape said this during the national launch of the 2023/2024 global human development report by the United Nations Development Program recently at Avani Hotel.

He said the Human Development Report spoke to the Human Development Index (HDI) values which measured different country’s health, education and standard of living measures and ranked them accordingly.

“Therefore, Botswana has instituted policies that seek to wrestle the poorest in its society out of poverty in order to achieve a dignified standard of living, with access to various economic opportunities, access to affordable healthcare and access to quality education for all,” he said

On another point, he said Botswana had come a long way in addressing the twin development challenges of inequality and poverty. “When Botswana gained independence in 1966, we were classified as one of the poorest countries in Africa with probably the lowest human development ranking at that time, while today we fall in the high development index with a score of 0.708,” he said.

He noted that Botswana was working closely with the United Nations country team to support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and Vision 2036 through the Botswana-United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework.

The first cooperation framework, he said, covered the period 2017 – 2021 while the current one runs from 2022-2026. The framework, he said, allowed for greater engagements and collaboration by key stakeholders on a diverse range of both current and emerging developmental issues thereby promoting coherence in national development planning. “In this respect, I wish to acknowledge the invaluable contribution made by the United Nations country team to advance our national development agenda through our longstanding partnership dating back to our independence in 1966,” he said.

Minister Kwape also said Botswana was committed to forging new partnerships and engaging different stakeholders with a view to accelerate the implementation of the SDGs.

For his part, the UNDP representative, Mr Balazs Horvath said the launch signified the release of the latest report and its findings.

He said the forum was a platform to discuss challenges affecting human development and to examine the policy choices of different nations, adding that the objective was to “continuously learn and understand how economic and social growth” translated or failed to translate into human development. “Learning from countries that rank high on the HDI can guide national policies, strategies and interventions,” he said.

Regarding Botswana’s standing, he said its HDI rank and index had both slightly recovered from pre-COVID-19 years of 0.703 in 2019 to 0.708 in 2022.

Mr Horvath said UNDP Botswana would support the development of a national human development report on youth unemployment. 

He said the key development challenges and opportunities facing Botswana included undiversified sources of growth, inequality and gender disparities as well as climate change and other environmental threats such as droughts.

He noted that the evolution of human development in Botswana was a story of steady progress up to 2019, and that the economic and social shocks of Covid-19 led to a decline in both 2020 and 2021. However, he said the average global HDI has been improving since 2022 and was projected to continue to improve.

On the theme of the report, Breaking the Gidlock: Reimagining Cooperation in a Polarised World, he said it was influenced by the uneven global recovery stemming from failures to manage challenges of living in an interdependent world.

He said the report recommended easing polarisation by recognising that there was more common ground than typically assumed as well as to empower individuals with greater control and voice and to build an architecture for global public goods.

On a global scale, he said the report revealed a divergence between high HDI countries and low HDI countries and a shift from previous trends of convergence. He noted that high-income countries were projected to fully recover or surpass their 2019 values, but that 51 per cent of the poorest countries were not projected to do so. ENDs