Goats have a key role in ensuring food security and economic livelihood to smallholder farmers in rural areas. Women play a vital role in goat rearing, promoting economic autonomy within households. Indigenous goats dominate and are of high significance due to their adaptive traits that are relevant for climate change and low maintenance. However, lack of emphasis on farmer-centered technology development and proper breed characterization remains a hitch to sustainable utilization and breed development of indigenous goats. This can be over come through proper linkage between market and production, workable regional and national agricultural policies, community breeding programs, collaborative research work within the region, and consistent government support.

A total of 153 communal farmers in four agro-ecological regions of Botswana were interviewed using a structured questionnaire. The aims of the survey were to characterise existing communal goat production systems, evaluate the importance of goats to farmers and identify breeding practices and constraints encountered in goat production in Botswana. Data was collected on socio-economic parameters, general and breeding management practices and major constraints limiting goat production in Botswana. All respondents were small-scale communal farmers with 63% respondents practising mixed crop-livestock farming and 37% keeping livestock as their primary activity. The majority (33%) of respondents were older than 60 years. Over 80% of the farmers kept goats for cash required for tuition, school uniforms and household commodities as well as re-stocking of animals. Most farmers (62%) kept indigenous crossed genotypes. Generally, uncontrolled mating was practised with the majority of farmers (41%) using on-farm reared bucks for more than two years of breeding and communal bucks (36%) as an alternative. The major constraints limiting goat productivity in communal areas included uncontrolled breeding, predators, theft and diseases. Issues raised by farmers should be considered in designing and implementing effective breeding programs for goats to improve their overall productivity and contribution to poverty alleviation in these communities.

Tswana goats that were kept in communal systems in three agro-ecological regions in Botswana were characterized according to phenotypic measurements and genotypic data. Objective measurements for 123 goats included bodyweight (BW), body length (BL), heart girth (HG), height at withers (HW), and tail length (TL), while qualitative traits included coat colour and presence or absence of horns and beards. Age was estimated based on dentition. Hair samples were collected from 48 of the phenotyped animals in the largest region (central region) and genotyped with the Illumina Goat50K SNP chip. Mixed coat colour was predominant and across regions 95% of the goats were horned and bearded. Goats in the northwest region had the lowest BW and significantly higher HG values in all age groups compared with other regions. Goats over four years old in the central and northwest regions were significantly longer in body compared with the ones from the southern region. The average expected heterozygosity and inbreeding coefficient were 0.423 ± 0.03 and 0.009 ± 0.05, respectively. Principal component analysis clustered most animals, with a few outliers. The effective population size has decreased over time and at 13 generations ago was estimated at 266. There were high genetic and phenotypic variations in the indigenous Tswana goats, which should be exploited to increase performance through within-breed selection and structured crossbreeding.