Built on the Botswana programme
Since 2023, with support from a Ford Foundation grant, Anthropos has been building a regional secretariat to provide legal, financial, strategic, technical and administrative support to San CBOs, and working with communities, partners and governments to expand land rights and opportunities for indigenous communities.
The Botswana Indigenous Rights Programme is closely aligned with these ambitions and serves as the foundation for these two core programmes. The four-year reform window — the Inter-Ministerial Committee process, the National Indigenous Peoples Policy, the National Land Audit, the CKGR restoration — is the gateway to this work, not the destination.
Lands and Livelihoods
Securing land as the long-term asset base for San communities.
Why it matters
Land loss has been the principal driver of San marginalisation. The loss of land and natural resources stripped San communities of their only substantive capital assets and continues to limit the impact of every other development intervention. Poverty, welfare dependency, educational exclusion, poor health and social breakdown flow directly from landlessness.
Restoring or expanding San land access is the foundational precondition for sustainable development. The four-year reform programme is the gateway to this work, not the destination.
Two parallel tracks
Land tenure for the wider San population
The programme addresses the wider San population beyond the CKGR — an estimated 60,000–100,000 people living in 73 Remote Area Settlements, on commercial freehold farms, on tribal land, in Wildlife Management Areas and on the fringes of towns.
The work includes support for the National Land Audit, comparative legal research for tenure reform, direct legal support to communities facing ongoing dispossession, and sustained institutional support to the community bodies that any new tenure framework will vest rights in.
From beneficiary to equity holder
The lands to which San retain or may secure access are largely unsuitable for conventional agriculture but highly valuable in other respects: ecologically intact, biodiverse, carbon-storing, solar-rich, and culturally significant. The challenge is to convert that value into community wealth.
Anthropos's approach is a structural shift from the conventional CBNRM model — community-as-beneficiary, receiving a share of revenues from enterprises run by others — to community-as-equity-holder, where the underlying land asset is capitalised as the community's contribution and value flows to communities as owners. This model is well-established in other indigenous land contexts but has not yet been deployed at scale in the Southern African San context.
Revenue streams
Community-owned enterprises
Community ownership of lodges, concessions and brands, with operators contracted in, moving community value capture from 10–30% of revenues to a controlling share of returns.
Environmental credit programmes
Community-owned carbon and biodiversity credit programmes on San-managed land.
Solar and renewable projects
Solar and other renewable energy projects on community land, with communities as equity partners.
Cultural tourism & heritage
Community-owned cultural tourism and heritage programmes.
CBO Support
Building a strong network of San community-based organisations.
Why it matters
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 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.
What the programme does
Immediate institutional priorities
- Restructuring Khwedom Council as the national San representative body
- Supporting national dialogue and consultation with Government through the Inter-Ministerial Committee
- 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
The Anthropos support model
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.
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