The Kavango Fault Zone lies in the region of northern Botswana and northeastern Namibia, at the southwestern tip of the East African Rift system near the Okavango Delta. It comprises a set of northeast-trending normal faults marking one of the youngest and least developed parts of the great continental rift.
Here the African continent is only in the earliest stages of splitting apart, and the faults accommodate slow crustal extension that is beginning to fracture the ancient Kalahari basement. The famous Okavango Delta itself owes its shape to subsidence between these bounding faults, which trap the inland-flowing river into a vast wetland.
Despite the region's youthful rifting, the zone is capable of significant earthquakes: the 2017 Botswana earthquake (magnitude ~6.5) struck this area, one of the largest ever recorded in the country. Its occurrence confirmed that the Okavango-Kavango region is a genuine, if incipient, active rift boundary.