Money – Capital & Investment · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026
Botswana has mined diamonds for half a century and cut comparatively few of them at home. In July 2023, De Beers and the government moved to narrow that gap, pledging P1 billion for a diamond-beneficiation fund intended to build local cutting and polishing capacity, create jobs and keep more of the stone's value inside the country, with the gains contingent on skills development.
Beneficiation is the long-standing answer to a structural complaint: a rough diamond exported is value handed to whoever cuts it elsewhere. Moving the cutting, polishing and trading onshore captures margin, builds a skilled labour pool and diversifies an economy still anchored to the mine. The P1 billion fund is a bet that the capacity can be built where, so far, it has been thin, and that it can hold once the cheque clears.
The Value Question: Where the Stone Is Cut
The case for the fund is straightforward. Cutting and polishing add value that rough export forgoes, and they do it through labour, the kind of skilled, repeatable work that anchors jobs rather than royalties. For an economy long described as a successful but undiversified diamond exporter, capturing more of the chain at home is the textbook move toward broadening the base beyond the mine gate.
It also changes who benefits. Royalties accrue to the Treasury; a polishing industry pays wages into towns, supports suppliers, services and training providers, and seeds the trading and certification skills that travel beyond diamonds. The value retained is not only fiscal, it is industrial, and that is the kind of diversification an exporter economy struggles to buy any other way.
The value Botswana keeps depends on where the stone meets the wheel.
The Binding Constraint: Skills, Not Capital
The fund's own condition names the harder problem. The jobs and value are contingent on skills development, which signals that money is not the scarce input; trained cutters, polishers, graders and managers are. A polishing industry is a workforce before it is a building, and that workforce takes years and deliberate training to assemble to a standard that holds against the world's established cutting centres.
This is where past beneficiation pushes have tended to stall. Capacity stood up faster than the skills to run it competitively, and work drifted back to cheaper, deeper labour pools abroad. Tying the P1 billion to skills development is an acknowledgement that the fund succeeds only if the training pipeline keeps pace, and that a polishing seat is worth nothing until someone can fill it profitably.
A polishing wheel without polishers is just imported equipment.
The Timing: Beneficiation as a Hedge, Not a Bonus
The fund also has to be read against the clock. Diamond reserves are finite, and the value an economy can still build from them is largest while the mines are producing, not after. A cutting-and-polishing base that takes years to mature is therefore something to start while the rough is flowing, so that the skills, firms and trade relationships outlast the resource that seeded them.
Synthetic stones add to the urgency. As lab-grown diamonds press on the natural market, the defensible position is the one built on craft, certification and trade rather than on rough volume alone. A domestic polishing and grading capability is part of how a producer holds relevance as the market shifts, which makes the P1 billion less a reward for past mining than a hedge on future earnings.
The time to build the next industry is while the current one still pays.
The pledge is a credible step toward keeping more diamond value in Botswana, and its design is honest about the catch. Whether P1 billion translates into a durable cutting-and-polishing base will be decided less by the capital than by how many Batswana are trained to compete at the wheel, and whether the work stays once global buyers can take it anywhere. The fund buys the runway; the skills decide the takeoff.
Sources: Reuters
