Botswana Produced 14,733 Graduates in a Year

Botswana produced 14,733 tertiary graduates in 2024, at a graduation rate of 80.1%. In 2009 the figure was 7,306. The system roughly doubled its output in fifteen years, peaking at 16,305 in 2022.

Over broadly the same period, the number of graduates without work rose from 48,076 to 70,512, an increase of 46.7%.

Two caveats on that figure, both from the Council’s own tables. The comparison is the fourth quarter of 2019 against the first quarter of 2024, which is four years and one quarter rather than the five years it is described as. And the series does not climb smoothly: it runs 48,076, 57,632, 50,142, 62,515, 59,528, 70,512 across those observations, so any two-point comparison is a choice about which points.

A third, larger caveat sits outside the Council’s tables entirely. The Minister of Labour and Home Affairs told Parliament in February 2024 that the number of unemployed graduates was 40,036 — some thirty thousand fewer, for effectively the same period. We examine that gap, and the claims built on it, in the claim that half of graduates are unemployable.

Where the graduates come from

Public universities produced 5,453 of the 2024 cohort, 37% of the total. The institutional breakdown:

• University of Botswana: 2,430
• Botswana Open University: 2,351
• Botswana University of Agriculture and Natural Resources: 345
• Botswana International University of Science and Technology: 327
• Botswana Accountancy College: 383

Beyond the universities, conventional private institutions produced 2,720 graduates, brigades and vocational training 1,884, conventional public institutions 1,530, private universities 1,495, technical colleges 824, colleges of education 495 and health sciences institutes 332.

By qualification, the higher education stream produced 6,048 bachelor’s degrees, 4,262 diplomas, 1,598 certificates, 861 master’s degrees and 15 doctorates.

The number that is missing

You will find a graduate unemployment rate for Botswana quoted in plenty of places. It is not an official figure, because Statistics Botswana does not publish one.

What exists is the absolute count of unemployed graduates, 70,512, and the observation that 13.8% of unemployed young people hold a university education while 68.7% hold secondary education. Turning those into a rate requires assumptions about the denominator that nobody has published. We are not going to do that arithmetic and present the result as a fact, and neither should anyone quoting one at you.

Which fields are producing unemployment

The Human Resource Development Council publishes unemployed graduates by occupational group, and the movement between late 2023 and early 2024 is sharp in places. Business and administration associate professionals rose from 8,288 to 10,789. Information and communications technicians rose from 1,557 to 3,837. Engineering and related professionals rose from 1,624 to 3,130.

The Council’s own reading is blunt: the finance and business learning fields record the highest student enrolments, and the same sector records the highest unemployment among graduates. Supply is being produced where it is already saturated.

That does not make an ICT qualification a safe bet either. The jump in unemployed ICT technicians is one of the largest proportional moves in the table, and it sits alongside an ICT sector that employs about 6,000 people in total, which is covered in how big Botswana’s ICT sector is.

The part before university

Only 32.5% of the relevant cohort transitions into tertiary education. The gross enrolment ratio is 21.0, and vocational participation among 15 to 24 year olds is 2.0%.

So the graduate unemployment conversation, loud as it is, is about a minority of young Batswana. The majority never enter tertiary education, and the Council notes the concern that the remaining two thirds may be not in education, employment or training. The labour market they enter is described in Botswana’s two unemployment rates.

What to take from it

Not "do not study". The data does not support that, and a degree still correlates with better formal-sector access. What it supports is being specific: the field matters more than the qualification, the saturated fields are identifiable in advance, and the sponsorship system itself steers what gets produced, which is covered in how government sponsorship works and in the skills Botswana says it needs.