DPMN Bulletin: Volume IX, Number 2, May 2002

Poverty Alleviation through Civil Society: A Case of Botswana   Munyae Mulinge

 

I. Introduction

Botswana has one of Africa’s fastest growing economies today. But the proportion of the population that is poor has been rising significantly. Today it is estimated that well over 49 per cent of the population is poor. In light of this fact, poverty alleviation has become a major area of focus of government policy and programmes.

II. Indicators for Government Commitment to Poverty Reduction

The establishment of institutions such as the Botswana Institute of Development and Policy Analysis (BIDPA) and the Botswana Productivity Centre (BPC) testifies this. The former has been mandated to research and critically appraise Botswana’s development policy while the latter is responsible for finding ways to boost the productivity of the country’s labour force both in the public and private sectors of the economy.

A second indicator of the government’s commitment and struggle to alleviate poverty has been the experimentation with various forms of financial assistance programmes whose main objective is to empower citizens and make them stronger partners in the country’s development process. These have included the Financial Assistance Programme (FAP), the Small Micro Enterprises (SMEs) and the Citizen Empowerment Agency (CEDA), all aimed at assisting especially qualified citizens to engage in income and employment generating activities. In particular, the FAP aimed at stimulating the growth of sustainable employment, promoting economic diversification away from the over-dependence on the mineral sector and encouraging citizen participation in business. During the last government budget speech, the Minister for Finance and Economic Planning declared the termination of this programme and its replacement with CEDA.

In Botswana, as in most other African countries, most of the poor are found in rural areas. The success of the poverty alleviation campaign thus hinges on the inclusion of rural communities both at the policy formulation and implementation stages. However, financial assistance policies and programmes for the alleviation of poverty, such as those listed above, seem to favour urban-based citizens and to exclude the rural poor. It is perhaps in lieu of this fact that the government has set up the Department of Social and Community Development in the Ministry of Local Government, Lands and Housing to be responsible for poverty alleviation particularly among rural communities. Also, over the years, the government has spent generously on agricultural programmes such as the Accelerated Rainfed Agricultural Programme (ARAP) and the Arable Lands Development Programme (ALDEP) to address income insecurity among vulnerable households living in rural areas. The former involved government payments for every hectare of land a farmer ploughed, planted and weeded, draft power assistance and the provision of free seeds to farmers. Under ALDEP, on the other hand, small-scale farmers were to be assisted to increase productivity with the objective of making Botswana less dependent on imported food. The scheme also aimed at enhancing rural development and welfare by raising arable incomes and at creating productive and remunerative employment in the rural areas in order to absorb the rural under-employment and to reduce rural-urban migration. To meet these objectives, ALDEP stressed the raising of agricultural yields through improvements in farming practices and techniques, provision of on-farm investment packages and seasonal inputs and the strengthening of extension, marketing and credit services.

All the financial and other assistance programmes listed above manifest a poverty alleviation strategy by the Botswana government, which seeks to forge a partnership with members of the civil society. A closer scrutiny of most of these initiatives, however, reveals two major drawbacks which appear to cripple them. First, these are poorly conceived, formulated and monitored to effectively achieve their stated goals. Second, and most important for our purpose, is the tendency for the government to play the provider role while civil society remains the recipient. This has created a culture of entitlement which, to say the least, retards, rather than enhances, poverty alleviation efforts. With declining public resources, there is a need to reengineer poverty alleviation policies that target civil society to make its incorporation more comprehensive. Civil society should not just be the recipient (or benefactor) of government funded and implemented programmes. It should also be the prime initiator and manager of policies and programmes that are partially or even totally independent from those sponsored by government and other non-governmental organisations, but that are meant for improvements in the quality of life in the country. Such community initiated and managed poverty alleviation policies and programmes would complement governmental and non-governmental organisations’ initiatives. The success of such a strategy rests with the aggressive mobilisation of community fiscal and human resources. This can only be attained if the level and nature of community involvement in poverty alleviation in the country is revisited with a view to strengthening it further.

III. Potential for Community Participation

The potential for increased and more direct participation of rural-based civil society in poverty alleviation in Botswana is quite good. There are two major pointers to this. First, the village system of settlements that exists in Botswana and which concentrates rather than disperses populations provides the catalyst for the mobilisation of civil society in rural areas for collective action. Such a position of strength is bolstered further by the importance accorded to the chieftainship in the country. The power and respect still commanded by chiefs in Botswana offer an invaluable avenue for the mobilisation of community efforts for the alleviation of poverty. Through kgotlas (public meetings), chiefs can mobilise community members not just to deliberate on important central government-fronted development policies and programmes but also to identify and prioritise community needs, identify programmes for the satisfaction of those needs and to mobilise resources for the implementation of such programmes.

Second, the foundations for elevated grassroots participation in poverty alleviation in Botswana are already in existence and only require strengthening. I am referring to the existence of Village Development Committees (VDCs) all over the country, the empowerment of Local Councils to become the custodians of rural development and its administration, and the decentralised control of one of the major factors of production – land – through rural-based Land Boards. Concerning VDCs in particular, they could be turned into major organs of rural development by strengthening their role in the identification of community priorities, appraisal of government policy, development projects and assistance programmes. Most important, VDCs should become major avenues for community mobilisation for the initiation of development programmes separate from those wholly supported by governmental and non-governmental organisations.

IV. Conclusion

To conclude, the future of poverty reduction in Botswana may as well lie with the strategy of citizen empowerment. However, the phrase citizen empowerment must be operationalised more broadly so as to place increased responsibility for development in the hands of civil society members and make them increasingly become the managers of their own destiny. This will position them at the centre of the poverty alleviation initiatives in terms of policy formulation, identification of programmes of actions and the actual implementation, administration and financing of the same.