Botswana Got Online. Computer Use Went Down.

Botswana connected itself quickly. In 2014, 40.6% of households had internet access. By 2024 it was 68.9%, a rise of 28.3 percentage points.

Over exactly the same decade, the share of individuals using a computer fell, from 41.4% to 32.2%.

Both things are true, and together they describe the single most important constraint on learning technical work in this country.

The country connected through a handset

Of households with internet access, 86.1% reach it over a mobile broadband network through a handset. Among individuals, 84.2% use a mobile phone and 60.7% a smartphone, while 57.5% use the internet at all. Mobile phone over a cellular network is the access device for 87.2% of internet users.

So the typical connected person in Botswana has a smartphone, a data bundle, and no computer. That is a perfectly good way to read, to learn, to apply for work and to run a business. It is a poor way to write software, analyse data or do design work.

What stops the other third

Statistics Botswana asked households without internet why. The answers, in order: equipment is too expensive, 34.3%; lack of skills or knowledge, 32.4%; the service costs too much, 28.7%; no electricity, 25.5%.

Note the order. The hardware is the first barrier, ahead of the data. And connected households skew heavily urban, 79.2% against 20.8% rural.

The part that is getting better

Data prices moved in 2025 and 2026. The communications regulator concluded a costing and pricing study in May 2025 and directed operators to cut mobile and data prices from that October. In February 2026, BTC published reduced retail prices following regulator approval, including 1.5GB for P10 on a daily bundle and 30GB for P199 monthly.

Public access has expanded too, though the figures here come from ministerial statements rather than audited returns, and should be read that way. In August 2024 the Minister of Communications, Knowledge and Technology said the SmartBots programme had connected 1,138 public facilities across 144 villages, including 609 schools serving over 380,000 pupils, with more than 470,000 people a week using free public wifi. Separately, BoFiNet reported public hotspots growing from 35 in 2015 to 1,272 by the end of 2023.

What to do about it, practically

If you are learning technical work from a phone, the constraint is real but not absolute, and the order of operations matters.

• Phone-first learning works for reading, video, and the conceptual half of any course
• Writing code needs a keyboard and a screen, so budget for access rather than ownership: a library, a campus lab, a co-working desk, or a shared machine
• Buy the cheapest usable laptop before the newest phone if the goal is technical work, because the hardware barrier is the one households themselves name first
• Hosted development environments reduce how much machine you need, but they increase how much data you need, which is the other barrier

This is also why advice imported from elsewhere lands badly. A course that assumes a personal laptop, unmetered broadband and a quiet room is describing a setup a minority of Batswana have. Our bootcamp piece and what a junior engineer actually needs to know are both worth reading against that, and the skills worth learning question looks different when the device is a phone.