A tale of two nations: Malawi’s rise, Botswana’s reckoning
mfolo mfolo | Monday August 24, 2026 06:00
Four years ago, at the 2022 COSAFA Women’s Championship, Malawi and Botswana were separated by nothing more than a 1-1 draw in a tough group that also included Tanzania. Today, the two neighbours could hardly look more different on the continental stage. Malawi’s Scorchers have just returned home from Morocco as WAFCON 2026 runners-up and newly minted 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup qualifiers. Botswana’s Mares were not in Morocco at all.
The contrast is stark enough to demand explanation. Malawi qualified for a first-ever Women’s Africa Cup of Nations appearance in October 2025, beating Angola 2-0 on aggregate after two late goals from Faith Chinzimu sealed the tie. Nine months later, in the newly expanded 16-team tournament, the Scorchers were drawn into one of the toughest groups alongside defending champions Nigeria, Zambia, and Egypt.
They beat Nigeria in the opening match. They went on to eliminate Ghana in the quarterfinals and Algeria in the semi-finals, a run that guaranteed Malawi automatic qualification for the 2027 World Cup in Brazil before a ball was even kicked in the final.
That final, played on August 16 in Rabat, ended in a 3-0 defeat to Cameroon, with Marie Ngah scoring twice either side of a Naomi Ndjoah Eto strike. But the scoreline did little to dampen the celebrations back home. Fans gathered in force at the airport to welcome the team, treating a runners-up finish as a triumph, fitting, given that Malawi arrived in Morocco as the lowest-ranked side in the entire competition.
Botswana’s own story reads very differently. The Mares made history in 2022 by reaching their maiden WAFCON and advancing to the quarterfinals, still the best finish of their history. They returned to the finals in July 2025 courtesy of a 2-1 aggregate win over Kenya in the final qualifying round, and produced a memorable injury-time 2-1 win over Tunisia in Casablanca. But defeats to Algeria and Nigeria in the earlier group games, both by a single goal, meant the Tunisia win came too late: Nigeria and Algeria’s goalless draw in the parallel fixture sent both of them through, and Botswana went out at the group stage.
For the 2026 edition in Morocco, Botswana did not qualify at all, one of several sides, alongside DR Congo and Tunisia, to miss out on the expanded field whilst Cape Verde and Malawi made their first appearances. The immediate footballing consequence is significant: because WAFCON 2026 doubled as African qualification for the 2027 World Cup, missing the tournament closed off the very pathway that carried Malawi to Brazil.
Off the pitch, the picture has been unsettled for some time. The Mares have cycled through multiple head coaches in short succession, amongst them Mohambi Saulos, removed after a failed Olympic qualifying campaign, and Alex Malete, whose appointment marked the technical team’s third change in two months. The Botswana Football Association has repeatedly cited funding shortfalls as a constraint on scouting, contracts and preparation camps. More recently, the 2025–2026 Botswana Women’s National League season ended in controversy after a medal mix-up involving champions Gaborone United Ladies, drawing public scrutiny towards how FIFA-funded development money for the women’s game is being administered.
Malawi’s rise rests on two pillars that are unusually well aligned for a side ranked 153rd in the world. The first is talent concentration: captain Tabitha Chawinga and her sister Temwa, who plies her trade in the NWSL and finished the tournament as joint top scorer with five goals, gave the Scorchers a level of individual quality well beyond their ranking. The second is continuity: by several accounts, Malawi retained roughly four-fifths of its squad from the 2023 COSAFA-winning group all the way through the 2026 WAFCON run, allowing a settled group to mature together across cycles rather than being rebuilt each time.
Botswana’s pattern over the same period has been closer to the opposite: frequent technical-team changes, funding constraints acknowledged publicly by the association, and, most recently, governance friction at domestic league level. None of this diminishes what the Mares achieved in reaching consecutive WAFCON tournaments in 2022 and 2025, including a rare quarterfinal finish. But the comparison suggests the gap opening up with Malawi is structural rather than accidental, a matter of continuity and resourcing more than a single bad tournament. Whilst Malawi retained 80% of the team, the Botswana National Executive Committee took an arbitrary decision to dismantle the Mares after an infighting concerning the issue of allowances.
Most of those players are from Gaborone United, which has consistently been playing in the COSAFA Women’s Champions League and ultimately the Africa Women’s Champions League, and therefore provides a strong base for the Mares. For Botswana, the lesson from Malawi’s run is not that missing WAFCON 2026 was a blessing in disguise for World Cup prospects – the opposite is true. Malawi’s Brazil 2027 berth came precisely because they qualified for and advanced deep into the tournament; missing it removes a pathway rather than creating one. The more useful lesson lies in what sustained Malawi’s progress: stability in the technical team, consistent investment between cycles rather than around them, and clear governance of the funding that underwrites the women’s game. Botswana’s own quarterfinal run in 2022 proved the ceiling is real.
The question the Mares now face is how to rebuild the floor beneath it.
It is also worth noting that Botswana is amongst the first countries in AFRICA to develop a women’s football strategy.
*Mfolo is a former Botswana Football Association chief executive officer. He writes in his personal capacity