Botswana 🇧🇼

Botswana is a country in Southern Africa, one of the 5 entries this site files under that subregion. In formal use it is Republic of Botswana. The capital is Gaborone.

Its territory runs to 582,000 km², which ranks it 48th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Madagascar and just ahead of Kenya. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Kenya.

Some 2.5 million people call it home, placing it 143rd of 249 by population — between Gabon above it and Moldova below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 3rd of 5 in size and 3rd in population.

Botswana has no coastline of its own, so every ship-borne import and export crosses somebody else's border first. The good news is that the sea is only one frontier away: South Africa and Namibia have coastline, which makes them the obvious routes for freight heading to a port.

That geography has practical consequences. Landlocked countries carry higher freight costs than coastal ones because goods change hands, transport mode and jurisdiction more often, and because a neighbour's road, rail or customs problem becomes Botswana's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Botswana's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Botswana's borders, Zambia and Zimbabwe are landlocked as well, so a route in that direction only moves the problem along. The remaining borders are the ones that lead, eventually, to salt water.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇿🇦 South Africa
• 🇳🇦 Namibia

The coordinates the dataset gives are 22.0° S, 24.0° E, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 2,449 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

The Tropic of Capricorn passes across it. Paraguay, New Caledonia and Tonga sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

It borders 4 neighbours: Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The largest of them by area is South Africa, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 105.0 million people.

Botswana is landlocked. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, so all seaborne trade runs through a neighbour's ports. 2 of its neighbours, Zambia and Zimbabwe, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 4.3 people per square kilometre, which makes it very thinly populated. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

People from Botswana are called Motswanas.

2 languages carry official status: English and Tswana. English, the first listed, is shared with 90 other entries worldwide.

Inside Africa it places 44th of 59 by population, and it accounts for 3.4% of everyone living in Southern Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Southern Africa and Botswana sits 3rd of 5 by population and 3rd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Namibia just above and Lesotho just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

South Africa is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Southern Africa has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇳🇦 Namibia
• 🇱🇸 Lesotho
• 🇿🇦 South Africa

Money there is the Botswana pula (P, BWP). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Botswana, the answer is Gaborone.

Websites there use the .bw domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +267. Its ISO codes are bw and BWA, which is what most databases and flag files use.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.

Botswana does not have the Botswana pula to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is BWP, and the other one is listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in BWP travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Botswana among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.