Botswana’s ICT Sector Employs About 6,000 People

Botswana talks about diversifying into technology more than almost any other sector. It is worth knowing how large that sector currently is, because the number is smaller than the conversation implies, and that cuts both ways.

The count

In the first quarter of 2024, information and communication employed 6,043 people out of 754,146 in work. That is 0.8% of employment. Formal sector jobs account for 5,807 of them; 235 are informal.

For scale: public administration employs 153,044, wholesale and retail trade 118,508, education 68,218. The sector that is supposed to carry diversification is roughly one twenty-fifth the size of the one everyone wants to move away from working in.

The trend, with a warning attached

Across seven survey rounds the series reads 4,427, 4,136, 4,592, 5,197, 6,956, 6,152 and 5,807 formal jobs, from 2019 to the first quarter of 2024. Total ICT employment similarly ran 5,506 at the end of 2021, 7,508 at the end of 2022, 7,014 in the third quarter of 2023, and 6,043 in early 2024.

A sector this small sits on a small survey sample, which is why it jumps around. The honest reading is a sector of roughly five to seven thousand jobs with no clear direction in the published data, not a sector that grew 80% and then shrank 20%.

Output, which tells a steadier story

ICT produced 2.8% of GDP at current prices in the first quarter of 2025, with value added of P1,951.8 million and annual real growth of 0.9%. A sector with 0.8% of jobs and 2.8% of output is, by definition, higher value added per worker than the average job in Botswana.

That shows up in pay. Formal earnings in information and communication averaged P9,106 a month in the first quarter of 2024, against P7,143 across all formal employment. It is above average, and it is well below mining at P22,283 or finance at P19,635. The full picture is in what official data says Batswana earn.

Who actually employs

This is where published evidence runs out. Botswana Telecommunications Corporation is the only ICT employer in the country that publishes an audited headcount: 736 staff in the year to 31 March 2026, on revenue of P1.470 billion. Neither Mascom nor Orange Botswana discloses employee numbers.

In March 2025 the BPO provider CCI Global announced an agreement with government described as Botswana’s first major business process outsourcing investment, with "thousands of jobs" claimed. No seat count, investment value or timeline has been published, so there is nothing yet to check it against.

What a small sector means for a career

It means two things at once, and they pull in opposite directions.

• Domestic competition for the few senior roles is thin, so progression inside the country can be quicker than in a deep market
• There are very few of those roles, so a plan that depends on moving between local employers has limited places to move to
• Remote work for employers outside Botswana is not a side option here, it is the main way the market gets bigger

That last point is why getting paid from abroad matters more here than the size of the local sector, and why the software engineering guide is written with remote work assumed rather than treated as an exception.