Property – Retail & Commercial Property · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · Global Issue · June 2026

A solar plant is usually pitched as clean electricity, but it is first a construction project and then a maintenance contract that runs for decades. Botswana's energy and mineral exploration deals with Oman signal a pipeline of such projects, and behind each one sits demand for builders, electricians and technicians long after the ribbon is cut.

For a country with abundant sun and a young workforce, that overlap is useful. Solar deals do not only add generating capacity; they create a stream of construction and operations work that can be filled locally if the skills are ready in advance. The development question is not whether the panels go up, but who gets paid to put them up and keep them running.

The build phase: civil and electrical at scale

Constructing a solar farm needs site preparation, foundations, mounting structures, cabling, inverters and grid connection. These are real trades: civil crews, electricians, riggers, welders and project managers. Each project is a temporary surge in demand for exactly the skills Botswana's construction sector already trains, applied to a relatively new asset type.

Because the work is modular and repeatable, crews that learn it on one project carry that capability to the next. A pipeline of projects, rather than a single plant, is what lets a local workforce climb the learning curve and capture a growing share of each subsequent build.

Every solar field is first a construction site with a deadline.

The long tail: maintenance that does not leave

Unlike a one-off building, a solar plant needs decades of upkeep: panel cleaning in a dusty climate, inverter servicing, fault diagnosis, vegetation control and grid management. This creates durable, location-bound jobs that cannot be exported, anchoring skilled employment near the sites rather than ending when construction does. In Botswana's dry, dusty conditions, cleaning and maintenance demand is likely to be higher than in milder climates, which only deepens the long-term work.

The build creates the jobs, but maintenance keeps them.

Turning deals into a domestic skills base

The risk is familiar: contractors import their crews, and Botswana keeps only the electricity. Capturing the skills demand means training local technicians ahead of the build-out, structuring contracts to require meaningful local content, and treating solar installation and maintenance as recognised trades within the technical-education system rather than improvised on the job.

That preparation has to run ahead of the projects, not behind them. By the time a plant is under construction, the workforce decisions have largely been made. The window to build a domestic skills base is the gap between signing a deal like the one with Oman and breaking ground on the plants it leads to.

A solar deal is a skills deal only if the workers are local.

Skills that travel beyond solar

The work created by a solar build-out is not confined to solar. Electrical, civil and project-management skills learned on a renewable project transfer readily to other construction, to mining services and to the grid itself. A technician trained to commission inverters and manage a connection is more employable across the whole economy, which makes the investment in training worthwhile even beyond the specific plants the Oman deals lead to.

That spillover is the real prize for a diversifying economy. A pipeline of renewable projects can act as a training ground that lifts the general level of technical skill in Botswana, leaving the country with a deeper and more flexible workforce long after any single plant is built. The deals are an opportunity to upgrade the labour force, not merely to staff a project. A welder, electrician or site manager who cuts their teeth on a solar farm becomes an asset the wider construction and mining economy can draw on for years afterward, which is exactly the kind of durable capability a country moving beyond diamonds needs to build.

Skills learned on a solar site rarely stay on the solar site.

Botswana's renewable ambitions will be measured in megawatts, but their development payoff will be measured in trained people earning a living from them. The Oman deals point to a construction and maintenance pipeline that can deepen the country's skills base for decades, provided the workforce is prepared in time to claim the work rather than watch it pass through to crews from somewhere else.

Sources: Reuters