Founded in 1968 by Patrick Van Rensburg at Swaneng Hill Secondary School in Serowe, Mmegi came into being as a literacy-focused community newspaper project supported by a War on Want donation of R2,000 worth of printing equipment, built around Van Rensburg's belief that Botswana needed accessible reading material in both Setswana and English. After Van Rensburg left Botswana for Zimbabwe in 1980 and the paper ceased operations, he returned and relaunched Mmegi in 1984 as a national weekly broadsheet, which was later corporatized into Dikgang Publishing Company in 1992. Today, Mmegi is owned by Mmegi Investment Holdings and published by Dikgang Publishing Company, headquartered in Gaborone, Botswana, with the paper's name meaning "the reporter" in Setswana. Today, Mmegi is mainly focused on Botswana national politics, business, economics, sports, lifestyle, and entertainment from their headquarters in Gaborone, Botswana. One interesting fact: In 2003, Mmegi became the first private newspaper in Botswana to publish daily, a historic milestone that made it the only independent daily alternative to the government-owned Daily News, and it has since built a Facebook following of nearly 900,000, an extraordinary audience size for a newspaper serving a country with a population of just over 2.5 million people.