Botswana’s prized high cost low volume tourism, anchored by the world-renowned Okavango Delta has become a vehicle for extracting wealth from Batswana and redirecting it to wealthy foreign operators, Sunday Standard open source intelligence has revealed.
A number of official documents including UNDP reports, University research papers and expert analyses further reveal how Botswana’s growingincome inequality is aproduct of this tourism model that is designed to extract wealth from Batswana and redirect it to the wealthy, almost uniformly foreign elite. A study by Dr Pritish Behuria of the University of Manchester published last week, reveals that 82% of accommodation facilities in the Okavango Delta are foreign-owned, and only 11% of tourism companies pay tax locally. This points to a system where majority of the wealth generated by the country’s high-end tourism sector flows out of Botswana, bypassing local businesses and communities.
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