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Botswana, the world’s largest diamond producer, is betting that selling big gems to rich young Americans will ease its economic woes and it is trying to catch their eye via Instagram and TikTok.
That gamble saw it dip a toe into the world of luxury advertising recently, wining and dining social media influencers at a Michelin star restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village to pitch affluent 20- and 30-somethings on natural rocks over lab-grown rivals.
“One of our strategies is to really counter synthetics, ” Bogolo Kenewendo, Botswana’s 37-year-old mines minister, said in an interview from New York.
The evening was organised with high-end online jewellery seller The Clear Cut, which is a “voice for Gen Zs and is really helping us to tailor the narrative of natural diamonds in the US to a specific demographic, ” she said.
Kenewendo is promoting her country’s gems against an onslaught from cheaper, lab-grown variants, which have crushed prices for cheaper stones at the expense of Botswana, which gets more than a third of its budget and most of its foreign exchange earnings from the gems.
Diamond sales from the Debswana joint venture between De Beers, the biggest diamond mining company, and Botswana fell 46 percent last year, according to the central bank.
Synthetic stones also profit from the blood-diamond narrative that the proceeds of gem mining, in the case of producers including Sierra Leone and Central African Republic, has financed civil wars.
In response, Botswana counters that it’s a flourishing democracy and revenue from diamonds, discovered in the southern African nation soon after independence in 1966, have been used to benefit the entire nation.
“Diamonds do good. That is our selling point, ” Kenewendo said. “Almost everybody in Botswana who has been put through primary school all the way to university has been put through by government and through government revenues that are raised through the sale of diamonds.” — News24.com
Online Reporter