Our 2026–2029 programme is organised around four interlocking tracks. Each is designed to leverage implementation finance at multiples of its value once the legal and governance architecture is in place.
Building the Khwedom Council's capacity and the Khoena Programme as the standing platform through which San views inform national policy.
Closing the seven-fold gap between official and community estimates of the San population — from 18,000 to 120,000 — with a rigorous, community-led evidence base.
A structured, time-bound roadmap to restore the Central Kalahari Game Reserve as a living San landscape, combining rights, restoration and sustainable livelihoods.
Drafting, testing and embedding the legal and institutional architecture needed to make restitution durable across government, courts, and customary systems.
Fifty San leaders from across Botswana gathered in Ghanzi for two days of closed deliberations on how communities want to engage with government during the ongoing reform process.
Read the dispatchAt the direction of President Duma Boko, Anthropos and the Minister of Justice signed an MOU under which Anthropos will provide technical, strategic and financial support to the indigenous rights reform programme.
Read the announcementSmith Moeti and team report from Molapo on the first wave of consultations with G/wi and G//ana communities on restoring rights inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
Continue readingWe work with a small circle of funders, technical partners, and institutions who share a long-term commitment to San-led reform. If that sounds like you, we would welcome a conversation.
Get in touchCombining on-the-ground operations with strategic partnership, finance, and governance.
Anthropos Africa leads programme design and delivery on the ground: facilitating consultation, coordinating technical partners, supporting the Khwedom Council's institutional capacity, and serving as the formal counterparty to Government of Botswana under the MOU.
Anthropos Initiatives provides the strategic and financial backbone of the family. It holds partnerships with international funders, supports governance and quality assurance across programmes, and convenes the academic, legal, and policy expertise that Anthropos Africa draws on.
Anthropos Africa and Anthropos Initiatives each maintain their own boards of directors, with overlapping membership to ensure alignment. Programme oversight, financial reporting, and safeguarding standards are shared across the two entities.
All programmes are reviewed jointly with the Khwedom Council at quarterly intervals and annually with Government of Botswana counterparts.
Botswana's November 2024 elections opened a historic window for the recognition and restoration of San rights. Our four-year programme is designed to translate those political commitments into durable, community-owned outcomes.
For decades, Botswana's San population has faced systematic displacement, dispossession and marginalisation. In 2024, a new administration under President Duma Boko committed to recognising the San as a marginalized Indigenous minority and to taking concrete steps to remedy historical injustices — including the restitution of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, ratification of ILO Convention 169, and comprehensive legal and policy reform.
Anthropos Africa operates under a formal MOU with the Government of Botswana and the Khwedom Council. Our role is enabling rather than implementing: providing the technical capacity, facilitation, and partnership management that allow government and San communities to lead the reform together.
Lasting reform requires simultaneously community-owned, evidence-grounded, legally durable and financially sustainable foundations. Each workstream addresses one of these conditions — and none can deliver alone.
Strengthen Khwedom Council and the wider ecosystem of San-owned organisations so that communities can lead reform, hold Government accountable, and take ownership of outcomes. Grounded in Free, Prior and Informed Consent under ILO 169.
Build the evidence base on which every other workstream depends: a credible San census, a national land tenure audit, costed policy briefs, and a monitoring framework that holds the reform accountable.
A four-phase roadmap to restore San rights to 52,000 km² of ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, within a community-led conservation co-management framework. The largest structured land return to an Indigenous people ever attempted in a protected area in Africa.
The statutory and policy architecture that makes every other reform durable: ILO 169 ratification, replacement of the 1978 Remote Area Development Programme, and a new National Indigenous Peoples Policy with a costed implementation plan.
The programme is sequential and cumulative. Data and community organisation come first — without them, neither policy reform nor CKGR restoration can proceed on solid ground. The legal architecture they unlock, in turn, draws in the large-scale implementation finance that makes reform permanent.
Data audit and indicative census; Khwedom Council restructured; CKGR community body established; ILO 169 ratification initiated; core donors secured.
CKGR Heads of Agreement negotiated; National Indigenous Peoples Policy drafted; targeted data collection; bilateral proposals submitted.
Enabling legislation enacted; CKGR management plan drafted; full evidence base in place; major funding agreements finalised.
Co-management live; services permanent; San leadership central to oversight; conservation finance flowing; CKGR on self-financing trajectory.
A four-phase roadmap to restore ancestral rights to 52,000 km² of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, within a community-led conservation co-management framework.
The Government of Botswana has committed to recognising the right of return of San forcibly evicted from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve between 1994 and 2006. The commitment draws on the planned ratification of ILO 169, the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur, and the interim findings of the Inter-Ministerial Basarwa Committee.
Successfully implemented, this will be the single largest structured land return to an Indigenous population inside a protected area anywhere in Africa, and it will create the largest protected area on the continent managed under a unified, Indigenous-led conservation co-management framework.
The restoration of rights vests a welfare-dependent population with a vast natural asset base, and provides a framework for the investment needed to manage it. CKGR communities will:
The programme supports Anthropos as the technical partner responsible for designing, coordinating and executing the structured, time-bound roadmap. It is scaled to leverage implementation finance at multiples of its value — from conservation finance, bilateral agencies and multilateral bodies — once the legal and governance architecture is in place.
Without robust data on San population, land use, livelihoods and service access, policy reform has no empirical grounding — and bilateral funders have nothing to fund against. The data programme is the foundation on which every other workstream rests.
Estimates of Botswana's San population vary by a factor of almost seven. This range reflects not uncertainty, but the near-complete absence of systematic data collection — on population, on language, on land rights, on services.
Existing data is fragmented across Government ministries, Statistics Botswana, academic institutions and NGOs; it has never been integrated into a coherent analytical framework; and much of it is so outdated as to be misleading. No bilateral or multilateral funder will commit significant resources to a programme whose target population cannot be defined more precisely than a seven-fold range.
Land is not simply the primary grievance of San communities — it is the foundational issue from which all others flow. The loss of land and natural resources is the single most important driver of long-term marginalisation: it stripped communities of their only substantive capital assets, and it is the structural condition that limits every other development or welfare intervention.
The audit will document, for every settlement and relevant area: the formal statutory position (land board allocations, tribal land grants, existing instruments); customary and traditional use patterns recognised within communities; and — critically — the discrepancies between them. Land occupied or historically used by San that has been allocated to outsiders, registered fraudulently, lost through wildlife designations, or rendered inaccessible through CKGR game reserve status will all be mapped.
Outputs: community-level tenure profiles, a national synthesis report, a classification framework for tenure reform, and mapped spatial datasets suitable for legal proceedings, policy development and funder proposals.
The National Indigenous Peoples Policy, RADP replacement framework and ILO 169 implementation legislation all require empirical grounding. The audit provides it.
Tenure mapping, ecological baselines and settlement profiles form the factual basis for the Heads of Agreement and the management plan.
No serious funder will commit to a programme whose target population varies by a factor of seven. Credible data is the gate.
A permanent monitoring framework allows San organisations, Government and funders to track whether reform commitments are actually being met.
The budget scales with the ambition of new surveys commissioned. The programme is designed to attract dedicated research and data funding from the Tenure Facility, bilateral agencies and UN bodies. Without it, every other workstream operates in a factual vacuum.
Strong, accountable, sustainable San-owned organisations are the structural precondition for durable reform. This programme supports the national voice and the local ecosystem of CBOs that together make community ownership real.
Botswana has a long history of top-down interventions aimed at San populations. For this reform to break that pattern, San-owned organisations must lead its design and implementation. That requires two things in parallel: Government mechanisms for robust and ongoing consultation, and San organisations with the capacity to play that role at national and local levels.
Important foundations are already in place. The Inter-Ministerial Basarwa Committee conducted in-situ consultations across Ghanzi, Kweneng, Okavango, North West, Mahalapye and Serowe Districts in 2025 before fiscal constraints suspended further travel. San leaders met at the Dqae Qare national workshop in March 2026 and issued the Dqae Qare Declaration — identifying land rights, mother-tongue education and political recognition as highest priorities — and nominated Khwedom Council as their national body.
Ratification requires the full participation of Indigenous peoples and Free, Prior and Informed Consent as a prerequisite. Without a credible consultation architecture, Botswana cannot meet its international commitments.
Consultation identifies the most urgent areas for restitution beyond the CKGR — and builds the community organisations that will hold reformed land rights durably.
With reform necessarily progressive, consultation shapes which mother-tongue languages to start with, which hostels to replace, and how alternatives should be structured to meet local needs.
The Task Force provides informed, consistent oversight of the flagship Government programme focused on Indigenous Peoples, integrating land, livelihoods, services and governance.
Field notes, partnership announcements, and reflections from the work — from the Kalahari to Gaborone, and from the Khwedom Council to the cabinet table.
If you would like to hear about programme updates, consultations, and publications as they happen, get in touch.
Get in touchIf you would like to hear about programme updates, consultations, and publications as they happen, get in touch.
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