Road to 2027: Botswana stand out as one of Africa's fastest developing nations
Ranked only just inside the top 150 in the world, the southern African side has big plans to reach a World Cup after coming close in 2023...
“Botswana’s best chance of playing at the World Cup will come through women’s football,” said Maclean Letshwiti, President of the Botswana Football Association, to the BBC around 18 months ago.
The nation, ranked just 149th in the world by FIFA and only 29th in Africa alone, came close to being there in 2023 for what would have been - among hot competition - a remarkable underdog story.
The team has only existed for two decades and it took them nine years to win their first match. In 2022, they finally qualified for the Africa Cup of Nations for the first time, the tournament which would act as qualifiers for the following summer’s World Cup.
With a squad where 23 of the 26 played domestically in Botswana and in a group with eventual World Cup knockout stage sides Nigeria and South Africa, The Mares went toe-to-toe with both, losing 2-1 to another knockout stage side Morocco in the quarter-finals.
That put them into a repechage to gain a place in the World Cup play-offs, where another narrow loss to Cameroon followed, losing only 1-0.
But Botswana, with a side made up of players playing in a domestic league nowhere near the strength of some of its rivals, had competed with four of Africa’s most established nations, three who would go on to be among the last 16 in Australia and New Zealand.
“Through a partnership with FIFA, we managed to develop a strategy…”
That in itself is a remarkable achievement, but now the nation has its eyes on progressing towards qualifying for 2027, and like many are working with FIFA to work on strategies and funding they can put in place to move the game forward.
Tsholo Setlhoko is the woman in charge of that plan having been appointed the Head of Women’s Football by the Botswana FA, coming into the role in 2019 with 15 years of experience in the country, having studied at the University of Botswana and then gone into internships with several clubs in the country.
“The team used to be coached by one of our former national team coaches, Major David Bright, who passed away suddenly during COVID-19,” she says. “I joined him as a coach and worked closely with him and I learned so much from him because he had worked in South Africa and in South Africa they had more women than us working in a male-dominated sport and when he came here he encouraged me to get more involved in football.
“I was also volunteering with the league, doing administration during my spare time at university. I got involved with the under 17 and under 20 girls and boys teams as a physical trainer and I decided to go more down the admin route and got a chance to go on a scholarship to Budapest via the Botswana Olympic Committee.
“I got to see what people were doing in Europe, when I came back I stayed here without a job, but I volunteered a lot. I got involved with Virgin Active Botswana, then in 2019 when the BFA was looking for someone to be a manager for women’s football, I was fortunate enough to be hired specifically to drive the strategy for women’s football. Through a partnership with FIFA, we managed to develop a strategy, we were selected as a pilot project and I got into office immediately after FIFA approved the strategy.”
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Setlhoko admits the strategy was to “help us find direction” and that it has already put them on the pathway to what they achieved in the past couple of years, more than anything the first appearance at the Africa Cup of Nations last year.
“We realised through analysis a lot of factors were hindering women’s football in Botswana,” she says. “One of those factors was untrained and unlicensed coaches, untrained referees, unskilled administrators and less coverage from the media.
“We had no access to facilities for the children. Most women play on dusty grounds, so we had to improve on that. We had a lack of sponsorship and we needed to change the perception to show women can play football.”
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