About GEN in Botswana

GEN and Ngwana Enterprises organized Botswana’s first Global Entrepreneurship Week campaign in 2014. It quickly became a mainstay annual event anchoring the ecosystem. The next year, the campaign spread beyond Gaborone to other communities across the country where grassroots events organized by local partner organizations reached more than 700 participants.

As the campaign coalesced, GEN worked to improve coordination across startup sectors and align the support ecosystem. To further the government’s goal of diversifying Botswana’s economy beyond its traditional pillars — agriculture, mining, and tourism — GEN laid the groundwork for a national business angel network by drawing on its relationships with regional bodies including the African Business Angel Network, Smart Africa, the Tony Elumelu Foundation, UNCTAD and the World Bank. GEN also launched its monthly meetup program, Startup Huddle, in Gaborone to support Botswana’s entrepreneurs. Startup Huddle provides a structured forum in which founders give short presentations and receive constructive feedback from peers and mentors. Organized by Mavis Modise with support from the University of Botswana’s Engineering, Technology and Innovation Centre and its Business Clinic, the Huddle chapter in Gaborone is the first of its kind in Botswana.

GEN also connects Botswana’s founders to its global GEC events. GEC+Africa, GEN’s largest bi-annual gathering of entrepreneurial leaders, features a regional pitch competition where most recently three Botswanan companies, Ipachi Capital, Mattie’s Success and Heavenly Mum Care Packages, were among the finalists.

Botswana’s startups also competed successfully in the Entrepreneurship World Cup (EWC), a global pitch competition that GEN launched in 2019. EWC provides founders with training, mentorship, and exposure to investors as they compete for a share of US $1 million in prizes. Organized by PulaSpace with sponsorship by Orange Botswana, Ipachi Capital won the 2023 national finals. Blue Waters and Bantu Vision were also national finalists and received free training and up to $25,000 in service perks to advance their ventures.

A notable milestone occurred during the 2020 GEW campaign with the launch of a new initiative, HerInCharge, designed to champion women founders. HerInCharge is a forum in which prominent women business leaders gather to discuss building their companies, important milestones, and challenges and successes. The question and answer session allows new entrepreneurs to receive practical mentorship regarding what to aim for, what to expect, and what pitfalls to avoid when scaling a business. HerInCharge integrates Botswana’s women founders into GEN’s international community where they can access resources, programming and sector-specific networks. The German Embassy backed the pilot HerInCharge event with Ambassador Margit Hellwig-Boette opening the initial proceedings, which quickly became a cornerstone GEW Botswana event. Its popularity led the Women in Business Association to join GEW Botswana as a strategic partner and support the production of a live broadcast.

Beginning in 2023, PulaSpace, an early-stage micro-fund founded by Mooketsi Tekere, a GEN Global Leader, partnered with GEN to lead the campaign. With the support of Botswana’s government and the U.S. Embassy, the 2023 campaign highlighted the AgriTech startup sector through a series of events featuring Molebatsi Shimane Molebatsi, the Assistant Minister of Agriculture. The 2024 campaign centered on transforming agriculture through technology. A large event at the Botswana Investment and Trade Centre (BITC) brought together leading tech sector firms including Brand Botswana, the Okavango Diamond Company, the National Development Bank and YTV. The U.S. Ambassador to Botswana delivered the keynote address and sessions spanned artificial intelligence to solar energy. 

Government engagement has accompanied the campaign’s growth. As early as 2015, Vincent Seretse, the Minister of Trade and Industry, began engaging with GEN’s global platform. Botswana was an early adopter of the Startup Nations Policy Hack, a GEN-developed method for policymakers to beta-test regulatory ideas with their peers. During the 2022 GEW campaign, the government used the method to establish a Ministry of Entrepreneurship and an accompanying ministry blueprint. In 2024, the government established a unified Ministry of Trade and Entrepreneurship making Botswana one of the first countries in Africa to dedicate an entire ministry strictly to entrepreneurship.

GEN maintains extensive relationships with Botswana’s ecosystem leaders, including the Ministry of Economy, the Botswana Investment and Trade Centre, Brand Botswana, the Okavango Diamond Company, the National Development Bank, Orange Botswana, Ngwana Africa, the University of Botswana and the Women in Business Association. Together these ties connect local founders, investors and educators to GEN’s broader network and its global sub-networks.

To serve as a hub of the ecosystem, GEN convened a Botswana ecosystem development working group in 2025. Mooketsi Tekere and Farhana Akter Khan coordinate the group, which anchors the community by driving scale-up programming and cross-border collaborations. GEN’s mission remains to support Botswana’s ambition of becoming a diversified hub for African-led digital and sustainable enterprise by providing its founders with the knowledge, networks, capital, and policy support they need to scale.