Profiles – Women in Business & Rising Stars · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · Global Issue · June 2026
New industries are rarely built from scratch. They inherit the habits of the old ones, including who gets to lead. As Botswana opens new mineral and energy sectors beyond diamonds, the live question is whether these sectors will build inclusive leadership pipelines from the start, or simply reproduce the gender gaps that mining and energy carry almost everywhere. The default outcome is repetition; doing otherwise takes deliberate choice at the moment the sectors are still forming.
The opening is real. Botswana's mines minister said the country would expand exploration beyond diamonds, a direction Reuters reported in February. New sectors mean new firms, new boards and new senior roles, a rare moment when the leadership pipeline is being poured fresh rather than reformed. Such moments do not come often, and they do not stay open long. Most economies inherit their leadership structures fully formed and spend decades trying to adjust them; Botswana, in these emerging sectors, gets the unusual chance to shape them while they are still soft.
The window that closes quickly
There is a short window when a young sector is most open. Hierarchies are not yet set, networks are still forming and the cost of including women in senior roles is lowest because there is no entrenched order to disrupt. Once that window closes, change becomes a much harder retrofit, fought against habits and relationships that have had years to set into the concrete of how things are done.
That is the practical case for acting early. Inclusive pipelines built into new mineral and energy firms now are cheaper and more durable than diversity programmes bolted on a decade later. The new sectors are an opportunity precisely because they have no past to undo, and because the people building them can set the norm before anyone has a stake in the old one.
It is cheaper to build a pipeline open than to pry one open.
Beyond fairness: the talent argument
The case is not only one of equity. A country diversifying into unfamiliar sectors needs every capable leader it can field, and excluding half the talent pool is a luxury a small economy cannot afford. Inclusive leadership widens the search for the geologists, engineers and dealmakers diversification demands, and a wider search simply finds better people than a narrow one.
For Botswana, with its limited population and ambitious diversification goals, this is a hard-headed point rather than a sentimental one. The deeper the leadership bench, the better the odds that the new sectors actually succeed. Inclusion and capability point the same way here, which is the strongest possible footing for a change that is too often argued only on principle.
A small economy cannot afford to bench half its talent.
What building it would take
Pipelines do not appear on their own. They are built through technical training that reaches women, mentorship into senior roles, and procurement and hiring that treat inclusion as a standard rather than a favour. The new firms entering exploration and energy are where those standards can be set on day one, before a single hiring habit has had the chance to harden into a pattern.
The choice in front of Botswana is whether to treat the new mineral and energy sectors as a chance to do leadership differently, or to let them harden into the same old shape. The window is open now. The firms and policymakers shaping these sectors get to decide what walks through it, and the decision they make in these early years will be expensive to revisit later.
New sectors are a blank page; someone still has to write women in.
From intention to measurable change
Good intentions about inclusion tend to evaporate without something to hold them to. The firms that actually shift their leadership balance are usually the ones that set targets, track who is being promoted and tie those numbers to how the business measures its own success. Inclusion that is everyone's general aspiration and no one's specific responsibility rarely survives the first hiring crunch.
For the new mineral and energy sectors, the practical step is to build that accountability in from the founding documents, not to add it once the culture has set. Botswana has a chance to make inclusive leadership a default rather than a campaign, and the firms that treat it as a measurable commitment now will find it far cheaper than the ones forced to retrofit it under pressure later.
What gets measured early is what a young sector becomes.
Sources: Reuters
