Business & Markets · Lending interest rate · Botswana
Botswana’s lending interest rate fell to 6.3% in 2024.
6.3%
2024
Down 0.48 pp from 2023.
Updated 8 Oct 2026
In plain words
6.3%
What it is. The lending interest rate is the price banks charge private-sector customers for short and medium-term loans. It condenses many loans into one headline rate, so it hides the gap between a well-established company and a small borrower, and it leaves out fees. It tends to follow the central bank's policy rate and what banks pay to raise funds.
Neither way is good in itself. A falling rate eases the cost of credit for borrowers, while a rising rate pays savers more and lifts bank income, so the direction is good for some and costly for others. The latest figure is 6.3% in January 2024, down from 6.7% a year earlier, a fall of 0.48 percentage points. Since 2015 the rate has ranged from a low of 5.3% in January 2021 to a high of 8% in January 2015. The current level sits in the lower half of that range.
Why it matters. At 6.3%, a Botswana business financing stock or equipment pays less in interest than it would have at the 2015 level of 8%, and a household taking a personal loan faces a lower repayment bill. Savers earn less on deposits when lending rates are low. Banks keep a thinner margin on each loan, which affects how readily they lend to riskier borrowers.
| Period | Lending interest rate · Botswana |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 8% |
| 2016 | 7.3% |
| 2017 | 6.9% |
| 2018 | 6.5% |
| 2019 | 6.4% |
| 2020 | 5.8% |
| 2021 | 5.3% |
| 2022 | 6.1% |
| 2023 | 6.7% |
| 2024 | 6.3% |
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (CC BY 4.0) · Licence: CC BY 4.0
How to read this number
- Source
- Who published the figure
- Published
- When they released it
- Verified
- When we last checked it against the source
Every change is logged in Corrections. How the figure is made: Methodology.
Cite this number
Show text
Strata-AF™ Data, Lending interest rate, Botswana, 2024; source World Bank, World Development Indicators (CC BY 4.0), retrieved 8 Oct 2026; https://data.strata-af.com/business/lending-rate/botswana
Data insights · Worked out from the published figures
What this means
Working this out from the published figures…
Strata AI commentary is coming — reviewed, dated, and generated only from the figures on this page.
Methodology
Bank rate that usually meets the short- and medium-term financing needs of the private sector. Unit: %.
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (series FR.INR.LEND), retrieved through the World Bank API and published under CC BY 4.0. Updated annually; the World Bank's own source notes apply.