The reform is temporary. The institutions must not be.
The Botswana reform programme is by its nature temporary. The community organisations that hold government accountable to its commitments, channel community priorities into policy, and take custodianship of restored rights and assets are not. Any durable change for San communities rests on the continued existence of representative, well-governed and adequately supported community-owned organisations.
This continues a body of work that began with the Traditional Authorities Governance Programme in Namibia and rests on a clear diagnosis: the collapse of the regional San CBO ecosystem over the last decade — following the failure of WIMSA and the Kuru Family of Organisations — has been the largest single setback to San rights and development in a generation.
Since the collapse of the regional network, external funding for San has flowed almost exclusively to a small number of organisations with dedicated external support. Communities without that infrastructure have been structurally excluded from international funding flows, regardless of need.
Two phases, one enduring mission
Immediate institutional priorities
- Restructuring Khwedom Council as the national San representative body
- Supporting national dialogue and consultation with Government through the Inter-Ministerial Committee
- Establishing the G//ama Ngoo Association as a legally recognised representative body for CKGR communities
- Targeted institutional support to women's organisations, CKGR community trusts, and village-level representative groups
Building the regional network
- Supporting a network of effectively governed San CBOs across Botswana and the region
- Providing direct legal, administrative and financial support services so organisations can focus on delivery
- Helping communities derive maximum value from limited assets through partnerships with donors and the private sector
- Building CBO capacity to deliver on grant commitments and contractual obligations
- Providing direct legal support in negotiating commercial partnerships
- Establishing models for income and benefit sharing from shared assets
Sustained, outsourced — not capacity-build-and-exit
The defining feature is sustained outsourced essential services rather than the conventional capacity-build-and-exit model. In practice, Anthropos operates as a long-term institutional partner to San CBOs, providing legal, financial management, donor liaison, contracting and reporting infrastructure so the organisations themselves can focus on community engagement, advocacy and programme delivery.
The model rests on three observations: even the strongest San organisations depend on external support to operate sustainably; forcing CBOs to internalise full administrative capacity diverts scarce community leadership and creates single points of failure; and the cost of sustained outsourced services is a fraction of the cost of repeated cycles of CBO collapse and rebuilding.
Land without institutions is a dormant asset
Securing land and developing the means to generate long-term value from it both depend, in equal measure, on community-based institutions capable of holding the resulting rights and stewarding the resulting assets. Land restituted or regularised but held by an institution that cannot govern it produces a dormant asset — as the Dqae Qare Game Farm demonstrates. Equity participation negotiated on behalf of communities that lack the institutional architecture to exercise it is, in practice, indistinguishable from the benefit-sharing model that the equity approach in LEAP is designed to replace.
Without functioning CBOs, restored rights flow to other institutions
The reform commitments are substantial: restitution of 52,000 km² of CKGR land, ILO 169 ratification, replacement of the Remote Area Development Programme, a new National Indigenous Peoples Policy. None will be durable unless San communities have the institutional means to:
Supporting long-term institutional work for San communities.
We work with a small circle of funders, technical partners and institutions who share a long-term commitment to San rights and development.
Get in touch