Flag: Botswana

It is Botswana's national flag, so it means Botswana. The design is a light blue field crossed by a horizontal black stripe with thin white edges. Botswana adopted it on 30 September 1966, the day it became independent from Britain, and the design has not changed since. Most of the time the emoji simply labels a place or a person: someone's home country or roots, where a safari photo was taken, which team a fan is cheering, or which country a news post is about.

The colours carry a message. Blue stands for water and rain, precious in a country that is mostly Kalahari desert; the Setswana word for rain, pula, doubles as the national motto, a greeting and the name of the money. The black and white stripes stand for the country's different peoples living together, and for the zebra, the national animal. Botswana chose this design deliberately in 1966, next door to apartheid South Africa, as a statement that its citizens of every colour belonged equally.

For readers who know little about the country: Botswana is about the size of France with just over two million people, its capital is Gaborone, it is known for the Okavango Delta, diamond mining and one of Africa's longest-running stable democracies, and its people are called Batswana.

Why does the flag show up as the letters BW?

Your device has no picture for this flag. Every country flag emoji is really two hidden letter codes, here B and W, Botswana's international country code. A phone or app with flag artwork joins them into a flag. As of 2026 some systems, notably Windows, show the two letters instead. The sender still means Botswana; nothing was lost in transit.