Unity Dow (née Diswai; born 23 April 1959) is a Motswana[Notes 1] lawyer, author, human rights activist and Member of Parliament for Kgatleng West since November 2024.

Born in Botswana to a seamstress and a farmer, who insisted on their children obtaining an education, Dow grew up in a traditional rural village before modernisation.

The case gained Dow international attention and sparked a wave of changes eliminating gender disparity in nationality laws across Africa.

She has served on numerous international commissions and committees, evaluating the application of laws affecting the human rights of people in Kenya, Palestine, Rwanda and Sierra Leone.

The court found in favour of Dow concurring that the law impacted her free choice of whom to marry, could force her to be separated from her family if her husband and children's residency permits were not renewed, and was discriminatory.

[17] Dow had taken a two-year sabbatical from her law practice in 1991 for the case and during that time, she co-founded the Baobob Primary School in Gaborone and the AIDS Action Trust.

During the appeal, Attorney General v Unity Dow, the state argued that discrimination against women was protected by the constitutional provisions to preserve the traditional customs of Botswana, which was a patrilineal society.

[29] In 2004, Dow served as part of a United Nations mission to review the domestic application in Sierra Leone of international women's human rights with Ghanaian Charlotte Abaka, former chair of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women;[30] Feride Acar, founding chair of the Middle East Technical University's gender and women's studies programme, in Ankara, Turkey;[30][31] Dorcas Coker-Appiah, Ghanaian lawyer and co-founder of the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre in Accra;[30][32] and South African, Tiyanjana Maluwa, a law professor at Pennsylvania State University.

[33] In 2006, she was elected to serve on the executive committee of the International Commission of Jurists with six returning commissioners and three new members, including herself, Vojin Dimitrijević of Serbia and Raji Sourani of Palestine.

[14] Sesana and Keiwa Setlhobogwa brought the case on behalf of 241 other litigants when the Government of Botswana terminated the water supply in the reserve, refused to provide health services and transport for school children, stopped food distribution to orphans and the poor, and attempted the forced removal of the Basarwa from their settlements.

[35] After a four-year hearing, in 2006, Dow concluded that termination of services and forced relocation of the Basarwa represented an infringement to their constitutionally protected right to life.

The organisation had been refused registration by both the director of the department and Edwin Batshu, the Minister of Labour and Home Affairs, on the grounds that homosexual acts were illegal in the county.

[49][Notes 4] On 6 July 2012 Dow was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council as one of three independent experts to conduct a fact-finding mission on how Israel's West Bank settlements affect Palestinians.

[4][Notes 5] One of the reasons for this was the staunch opposition of the Batswana leadership for the British to merge their territory with that of South Africa, which led to a defensive resistance to Pan-Africanism and also a lack of investment in the nation's infrastructure and academic development.

[28][67] Each of Dow's works examines social practices which lead to an imbalance of power relationships and fuel violence against women, child sexual abuse, the AIDS crisis, and gender inequality.

Though her daughter, Mosadi (meaning woman), known as Mosa, and remaining son, Stan, do not believe the diviner's rituals will explain why their brothers died, they go along with the ceremonies prescribed.

[74] Similar themes carried into Dow's second novel, The Screaming of the Innocent (2001), which also examines women's empowerment in a country rife with police corruption, ritual murder, institutional secrecy, and societal silence.

[4] Exploring the cultural practice of dipheko, murdering someone to harvest their organs for their magical properties of luck and prosperity, Dow shows how the rich and powerful prey upon the illiterate rural population and buy the silence of authorities.

[76] The protagonist, Amantle Bokaa, who is completing her national service (known in Botswana as Tirelo Sechaba), discovers bloody clothes in a closet of the clinic to which she has been assigned.

[78] Because she is female and a child, she would appear to be powerless, but her education, which taught her the skills to deal with opposition and question beliefs, gives her the power and confidence to challenge the code of silence and social barriers in her way.

[84] Using the character of Monei, a young girl living in a rural village, Dow examines oral traditions and the use of folklore and legends as an means to instill moral guideposts and as a social control for children.

[85] The book questions such topics as the beliefs that killing a monitor lizard leads to torrential storms, that befriending someone with albinism will bring bad luck, or that drinking bull's urine will help one learn to whistle.

The themes in the story link Juggling Truths to Dow's first two novels and suggest that girls and women are able to develop their strength through education and independent thinking.

In Dow's eyes, society is constantly changing; as a result, custom, gender, identity, language, social construction, and institutions are fluid.

[89] A reflection of Dow's own life, the story tells of the transition from no paved roads to indoor plumbing and how diamond wealth provided access to education, health care, and utilities.

Though the case is unresolved, the accused was ordered to undergo an HIV test, because his victim had been exposed to unprotected sex,[93] which underscores societal changes and fluidity.

[68] Dow contributed to the book Schicksal Afrika (Fate of Africa) compiled by the former German President Horst Köhler in 2010, which collected works by well-known authors.

She begins each chapter, telling a true story of a person affected by HIV/AIDS, which is followed by Essex's commentary about testing, antiretroviral drugs, and solutions for Botswana's status as the country with the third highest HIV rate in the world.

Though Helen Epstein, a molecular biologist and journalist who writes about HIV/AIDS,[97] lamented that most of Essex's solutions required high technology, she found Dow's stories compelling and showed a willingness of Batswana society to frankly and compassionately tackle its problem with the disease.

[98] Fetson Kalua, a professor of English Studies at the University of South Africa,[99] called Dow "the most influential writer of fiction in Botswana today".