Fifteen young Batswana who carry the beautiful burden of pioneering the diamond revolution envisaged with the opening of HB Botswana this December at Diamond Technology Park, arrived home on Monday from a three-month training at HB Antwerp in Belgium.

It is anticipated that HB Botswana, the local version of HB Antwerp, the Belgian diamond technology company founded in 2020, will open at the end of this year, and grow to a hi-tech facility of 485 people by 2025.

A spokesperson of HB Antwerp Margaux Donckier told The Midweek Sun that the company has created an infrastructure to transform minerals based on fairness and honesty and that it is redefining how natural diamonds are sourced, crafted and sold. They have created a mineral infrastructure based on fairness in which miners and governments get an insight into the complete post-production retail value of their resources and reap the financial benefits.

To achieve this simplified supply chain, HB Antwerp has partnered with the government of Botswana and Lucara Diamond Corporation - a Canadian diamond mining company that owns and operates the Karowe mine in Botswana, one of the world’s foremost producers of high-quality diamonds larger than 10 .8 carats.

This system, which for the first time in diamond mining history simplifies the convoluted diamond supply chain, has now been cloned into what is known as HB Botswana. Donckier confirmed to this publication Tuesday from Belgium that they are “busy setting up the facility” at Diamond Technology Park. “We are installing all the machines, technologies, microscopes and others. We will be up and running after the summer break,” she said. The 15 pioneers have acquired expertise across the diamond value chain – rough planning; rough scanning; rough analysis; robot operators; laser operators; gemmologists; data administration, sales, research and development (R&D) and so on. They are trained to work with HB Antwerp’s proprietary technologies such as the Signum Droid - the world’s only fully-automated diamond polishing robot; the HyperLoupe which refines the planning process, raising it to a new level of accuracy, precision, and efficiency and enables HB artisans to explore and analyse the inside of the world’s largest diamonds; and the HB Capsule an IoT device that travels with the diamond, using blockchain technology and data analytics to track every stage of a natural diamond’s journey, from its birth to the atelier until it’s sold to an end consumer. Through HB Antwerp’s partnership with Microsoft Corporation, a film detailing this concept has been produced and can be accessed at: