Botswana policy interest rate
Bank of Botswana Monetary Policy Rate — the signalling rate at which the Bank conducts its 7-day Bank of Botswana Certificate (BoBC) auctions, repos and reverse repos, set by the Monetary Policy Committee (a statutory committee under the Bank of Botswana (Amendment) Act, 2022) at six scheduled meetings a year. The MoPR sits at the centre of a 200-basis-point corridor: Standing Deposit Facility 100bp below, Standing Credit Facility 100bp above.
| Current value | 5.5 percent |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2026-04-30 |
| Official source | Bank of Botswana — Press Release, Monetary Policy Committee Meets 18 June 2026: 'Monetary Policy Rate maintained at 5.5 percent' (decision (a) maintain the MoPR at 5.5 percent; (b) 7-day BoBC auctions, repos and reverse repos at 5.5 percent; (c) SDF 4.5 percent; (d) SCF 6.5 percent; (e) directive that commercial banks not increase Prime Lending Rates). Level first set at the 30 April 2026 MPC meeting |
| Last verified | 2026-07-24 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
SERVE THE MoPR, NOT THE 'BANK RATE'. Botswana's headline policy rate is the Monetary Policy Rate (MoPR). The Bank of Botswana's own Monetary Policy Statement 2026 states in a footnote to its interest-rate chart: 'On 28 April 2022, the Bank Rate was discontinued and replaced with the MoPR.' Any source still quoting a Botswana 'Bank Rate' is describing an instrument abolished in April 2022 and is stale — the last Bank Rate was 3.75 percent (set October 2020) and the first MoPR was 1.65 percent (28 April 2022, raised 51bp from the then-prevailing 1.14 percent 7-day BoBC yield). CURRENT LEVEL: raised 200bp from 3.50 to 5.50 percent at the MPC meeting of 30 April 2026, then held unchanged on 18 June 2026 (the latest decision as of confirmation). Both the October 2025 (+160bp) and April 2026 (+200bp) moves are described by the Bank as a RECALIBRATION to reinforce policy transmission and market signalling rather than conventional tightening — in each case commercial banks were simultaneously directed NOT to raise their Prime Lending Rates, so the headline policy move has deliberately not been passed through to borrowers. Context at the June 2026 decision: headline inflation 10.7 percent (May 2026), far above the 3-6 percent medium-term objective range, driven by fuel prices linked to Middle East conflict; the MPC forecasts inflation averaging 9.0 percent in 2026 easing to 5.5 percent in 2027; real GDP contracted 0.7 percent in 2025 after -2.8 percent in 2024 on weak diamond demand. NOT PEGGED TO THE RAND — Botswana runs genuinely independent monetary policy. The Pula is managed under a CRAWLING PEG (in place since 2005) against a basket that is 50 percent South African rand and 50 percent IMF Special Drawing Rights (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CNY); basket weights moved from 45 ZAR / 55 SDR to 50/50 in January 2025 and are reviewed semi-annually by the Ministry of Finance with the Bank. For 2026 the annual downward rate of crawl is maintained at 2.76 percent (raised from 1.51 percent in July 2025), implemented through small daily adjustments; trading margins around central parity were widened from ±0.125 percent to ±0.5 percent (January 2025) then to ±7.5 percent (11 July 2025), and for 2026 were made ASYMMETRIC — the Bank's buy rate cut from 7.5 to 3 percent below central parity while the sell rate stays at -7.5 percent, to encourage exporters to repatriate and convert foreign-currency earnings. Because the peg is to a basket with a managed crawl (not a fixed rand peg like Lesotho/Eswatini/Namibia), the Bank of Botswana sets its own policy rate independently of the South African Reserve Bank. Remaining 2026 MPC meetings: 27 August, 29 October, 3 December. Access note: BoB press-release PDFs are text-extractable but the /news/ HTML pages carry only a one-line summary — fetch the linked PDF for the full decision.
Earlier values
| From | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2024-08-22 | 1.9 | Bank of Botswana — Press Release, Monetary Policy Committee |
| 2025-10-30 | 3.5 | Bank of Botswana — Press Release, Monetary Policy Committee |
Get it programmatically
curl https://afriref.dev/v1/bw/policy-rate
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://afriref.dev/v1/bw/policy-rate/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://afriref.dev/provenance/bw/policy-rateOther Botswana series: VAT rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates