Life in Botswana: Every Number That Shapes It (1800–2100)

To measure a nation is to count the quiet revolutions of the everyday. In Botswana, these figures describe a transition from a precarious existence to a landscape of emerging stability. The reality of daily life is found in the movement from 75 % to 35 % extreme poverty and the expansion of electricity at home from 3 % to 48 %. These are not mere percentages; they are the physical manifestations of light in a room and food on a table, shifting the fundamental nature of survival.

The historical arc reveals a profound human transformation. Where life once stretched only 36 years, it now reaches 62 years. This trajectory is mirrored in the classroom and the clinic, as years of schooling grew from 1.2 to 6 years, while child mortality dropped from 320 to 75 per 1,000 births. As urban life expanded from 11 % to 41 %, the population moved away from the constraints of the past toward an average income of 3,800 international dollars.

If you were born in Botswana in the 2020s, your life is defined by these hard-won gains. You enter a world where internet access has risen from 0 to 29 % and family size has transitioned from 6.6 to 4.6 births per woman. With an average male height shifting from 167 to 169 cm and annual working hours decreasing from 2,200 to 2,050 hours/year, the birth lottery has provided a wider horizon of possibility than ever before.

Use our interactive tool to compute your parallel lives on MYRIAD.