Francistown City Council, Botswana’s second-largest municipality, is exploring the possibility of establishing twinning arrangements with Windhoek City Council and the coastal municipality of Swakopmund. 

Presenting the city's five-year Local Economic Development strategy during the ongoing FCC session yesterday, the Principal Economist, Mmolotsi Katholo, said the idea is to diversify Francistown's economic opportunities. 

Katholo said partnering with Namibia's administrative authorities would go a long way in driving its local economic development strategy through promotion of tourism and fostering twinning partnerships. 

The strategy is targeted at positioning Francistown as an internationally recognised city with a vibrant social life and improved quality of life supported by enhanced economic development. 

"We are considering serious twinning partnerships with cities within the region. This will help us to trade and benchmark since Botswana has bilateral relations with countries in the region. We want to export to Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa and other countries within the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It becomes easy to export to cities that the city of Francistown will be having twinning partnerships with."

The Population and Housing Census of 2022 indicates that the poverty rate in Francistown is estimated at 9.1 percent and Councillor Peter Ngoma said Botswana's second-largest city can only benchmark on the cleanliness of the City of Windhoek and adopt their strategies. 

"And it is that cleanliness alone which attracts more investors into that city because even the people of that city have learnt a lot now to know that they cannot throw a paper or anything while they are walking on the streets or after eating. So, they are maintaining that city's cleanup up to now." 

Another Francistown councillor, Lesego Kwambala, said the envisaged consideration to foster a twinning arrangement with the Municipality of Swakopmund will add immeasurable value to Francistown's desire to become a tourist destination of choice by the year 2030. 

"We want those best practices to be replicated in our country, in our city, so that we are able to improve the economic dynamics of this city and create jobs for ourselves. So, we are trying to partner with Swakopmund so that we can see what we can benchmark from them."

As one of the oldest towns in Botswana and the site of Southern Africa's first gold rush, Francistown is home to an estimated 105,000 people.