Intellectual – Frameworks & Theory · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026

Botswana's employers talk constantly about a skills gap, yet a sizeable pool of capable workers goes overlooked because their minds are wired differently from the norm. An HR conference in June 2026 put that contradiction on the table, urging employers to hire neurodivergent workers and arguing that inclusive teams can be two to three times more productive.

The framing matters. For most of its history, workplace inclusion has been argued on grounds of fairness. The conference shifted the case onto commercial ground, where operators actually make decisions: not whether neurodiversity is the right thing to accommodate, but whether it is a source of performance being left on the table. In a market where firms compete hard for a thin layer of qualified people, that is the version of the argument most likely to move a hiring manager.

The Reframe: From Accommodation to Output

Neurodivergence covers conditions such as autism, ADHD and dyslexia – patterns of cognition that diverge from the typical, often pairing real strengths in pattern recognition, focus or systematic thinking with real friction in conventional office settings. The conference's claim that inclusive teams can be two to three times more productive [TK] should be read as the speakers framed it rather than as a settled figure, but the direction of the argument is clear enough: capability and conventional presentation are not the same thing, and a recruitment system that conflates them pays for the error without ever seeing the invoice.

For a Gaborone employer screening for confident eye contact and a smooth interview, the cost of that filter is invisible. It does not show up as a line item. It shows up as roles left unfilled, projects under-resourced and talent that quietly routes around the formal economy into self-employment or out of the country. The reframe asks operators to treat that leakage as a measurable loss rather than an accepted background condition.

Inclusion argued as fairness gets nodded at; argued as output, it gets budgeted for.

The Practical Gap: Hiring Built for One Kind of Mind

Most recruitment pipelines in Botswana, as elsewhere, are tuned for a single profile. Timed interviews, open-plan noise and ambiguous instructions screen out exactly the workers a neuro-inclusive employer would want to keep. The conference's prescription was less about charity than about redesign – adjusting how people are assessed and managed so that capability is what gets measured, not how well a candidate performs the ritual of an interview.

None of this requires large capital, which is part of why the case is pragmatic rather than aspirational. Clearer written briefs, quieter work options and assessment by task rather than by interview polish are low-cost changes that any firm can trial without a budget line. The harder shift is managerial habit – the instinct to read fluency as competence – which is precisely why a conference aimed at HR practitioners is the right venue to move it. The people who design the funnel are the people who can rebuild it.

The barrier is rarely the worker; it is a process built for one kind of mind.

The Botswana Stake: A Workforce Too Small to Waste

The argument lands harder in Botswana than it might in a deeper labour market. A country of roughly two and a half million people, still working to diversify beyond diamonds and the public payroll, cannot afford to filter out capable workers on presentation alone. Every diversification ambition – manufacturing, services, technology-enabled work – rests on a workforce that is, by global standards, small. Discarding usable talent on the basis of interview style is a luxury that the economics does not support.

There is also a development logic to it. Workers screened out of formal employment do not vanish; they fall back on family, on informal income, or on the state. Bringing more of them into productive, taxed employment widens the base that funds everything else. Treating neuro-inclusion as a productivity frontier, rather than a compliance box, is the kind of unglamorous edge that compounds quietly across a whole economy.

A small workforce makes inclusion an arithmetic question before it is a moral one.

The conference offered a frame, not a programme, and the figures attached to it remain the speakers' rather than the country's. But the underlying point survives the caveat. Botswana's competitiveness will be decided partly by how completely it uses the people it already has, and a hiring system that mistakes conformity for capability quietly narrows that pool. The cheapest productivity gain on offer may be the one that asks only that employers look more carefully at who they have been turning away.

Sources: allAfrica