2. I am sure it will come as no surprise to most of you that the greatest single challenge facing my nation, which is the reason for my coming to Washington DC this week, is the fight against HIV/AIDS. According to some estimates the number of HIV positive people among our young adults is about 35%, while overall perhaps 300,000 out of our total population of about 1.7 million are infected. Whatever the figure there can be no questioning the fact that in recent years the citizens of my country have found themselves spending too much of their time burying people who have otherwise been in the prime of their lives.

3. In this respect, while we are thankful for the generous support we have received from outsiders, we in Botswana recognise that it is ourselves alone who must achieve our victory in the war against HIV/AIDS. Unfortunately, there still exists within our society a great deal of stigma associated with the disease. As a result even though we are now able to offer such interventions as Anti-Retroviral (ARV) therapy to preserve the living and protect the unborn, the majority of our sexually active people still do not know their HIV status. To help overcome this at the beginning of the New Year the detection of HIV should become a regular part of blood tests conducted in Government health facilities for medical purposes. Such tests will be routine, but not compulsory.

4. I am personally optimistic that we are in the process of turning the corner in our fight against the pandemic.

But, I must emphasise, it would be wrong to expect a rapid decline in the number of our citizens who are HIV positive. It is rather our goal to keep our current infected population alive in the coming years, while stemming the further spread of the virus.

5. After HIV/AIDS the next biggest challenge my nation faces is that of assuring the overall welfare of our people through continued economic development. While we have enjoyed one of the highest growth rates in the world over the last three and a half decades, our future prospects are tied to our ability to move away from our current over-dependence on mineral exports. This will require us to diversify our economy through greater foreign as well as domestic investment.

6. One area in which we have a significant competitive advantage is tourism. It is for this reason that I shall this afternoon be addressing a symposium on the theme "Conservation is Good Business, which being jointly sponsored by the African Wildlife Foundation and the Corporate Council on Africa.

7. My country's unique cultural heritage, as well as flora and fauna, are immense assets, which need to be prudently utilised. An especially challenging area is the management of our elephant herd, whole numbers are estimated to exceed 120 thousand, or about one out of every five wild elephants in the world. While our elephants are a major tourist draw card, their current numbers are environmentally unsustainable. But, restoring balance will be neither easy nor free of controversy.

8. Let me also say that, notwithstanding the above challenges, my nation in recent years has continued to progress as a model of good governance, social harmony and economic opportunity for outside investors as well as its citizens. The best testimony of this is not anything I can say to you, but rather what other, unbiased, observers have been reporting about us just in the past few months.

9. For example, the latest, July 2003, UN Economic Report singles out Botswana as Africa's overall number one performer. In so doing the report, among other things, concluded, that our legal system was more effective at enforcing contracts, that our laws and regulations are more predictable, transparent, and uniformly applied, that the quality of the civil service is better, and the access to and reliability of telecommunications, transport and electricity are greater, in the aggregate, than elsewhere on the continent. We were further commended for having made notable efforts to promote women's access to education and health, while moving towards gender equality in employment.

10. Our nation's well established tradition of good governance was further highlighted last June at the World Economic Forum in Durban, where our public institutions were once more proclaimed to be the "Best in Africa" in terms of their quality, low levels of corruption and respect for the rule of law. This past month, we were also ranked number one in Africa in the World Economic Forum's 2003 - 2004 Global Competitiveness Report.

11. Our nation also recently received the highest accolades in the Economic Freedom of the World: 2003 Annual Report, released by the Cato and Fraser Institutes, in which we were ranked alongside Norway and Japan as having among the world's highest levels of economic freedom.

12. The favourable image of our country has been further reinforced, on an annual basis by the independent corruption perception studies carried out by Transparency International, which have consistently rated us as not only the least corrupt country in Africa, and the developing world for that matter, but indeed among the best in the world.

13. I believe one of the secrets of our success has been our commitment to empowering all members of our society. In this respect, we take special pride in our progress towards gender equality. According to the 2003 UN Human Development, Botswana was ranked sixteenth in the world in terms of its total percentage of "females serving as legislators, senior officials and managers". The combined figure for women occupying senior leadership positions in our country as of 2002 was 35%, which placed us ahead of the current Member States of the European Union. In the same report, we also numbered among the handful of countries where females are now actually in the majority in the combined category of professional and technical employment at (52%). These figures demonstrate that our society has both the will and capacity to change with the times.

14. Finally, our commitment to empowering our people is perhaps best reflected in our sustained commitment to education and training, which each year accounts for over 25% of our budget. This has transformed our society. Whereas at independence less than 10% of our people could read and write, while only 64 had progressed beyond senior secondary school, today according to UNDP the literacy rate of our young adults is about 90%, while tens of thousands are being sponsored for tertiary and post-graduate training. As a result outside investors now have an incentive to take advantage of the human, as well as natural resources, we as nation have to offer.