Botswana’s Labour Law Changed in September

If you have read anything about employment rights in Botswana written before September, it describes a law that no longer applies.

The Employment and Labour Relations Act, Act 27 of 2025, commenced on 1 September 2026. Its section 292 repeals the Employment Act, Chapter 47:01, which had governed employment in this country since December 1984. It also consolidates the Trade Unions and Employers’ Organisation Act and the Trade Disputes Act into a single statute of 33 parts.

This was not a quiet amendment. The Bill passed Parliament on 16 July 2025 with 35 of 37 voting members in favour, one against and one abstention, and the commencement date was agreed with Business Botswana and the trade unions. The reform process began in 2017, when Botswana asked the International Labour Organization for technical assistance.

What changed that affects an individual career

• Probation is capped at six months, extendable only in limited circumstances
• Dismissal during probation now requires that the employee was told of the shortcoming and given training or support to improve
• Fixed-term contracts are capped at twelve months unless there is objective justification, and a breach converts the contract to indefinite
• Part-time and fixed-term staff must not be treated less favourably than permanent colleagues
• Maternity leave rises from twelve to fourteen weeks, paid at 70%
• Constructive dismissal is expressly recognised, and retrenchment requires consultation with employees
• Recruitment must be merit-based, with hiring on favouritism, religious affiliation or tribal lines prohibited

The twelve-month floor on contracts is the one most likely to show up in a job offer. In September the Minister of Labour and Home Affairs noted that some companies had been using contracts running from one to six months, and that the minimum contract period is now twelve.

What we are not telling you

Notice periods. The Act contains sections on notice of termination, payment instead of notice, and termination without notice, and we have confirmed those sections exist. The full text sits behind a subscription, and we have not read the durations.

So this piece does not state them. If you need the number for a real decision, read the Act or the Gazette, or take advice. We would rather print a gap than a figure we have not seen, which is the same standard applied to salary data, where the official numbers also stop short of what people want to know.

One specific warning, since it will be the first thing a search returns: at least one commercial employment guide states the Act came into force on 1 July 2026. The Minister told Parliament 1 September 2026, and the ILO agrees. The guide is wrong, and it is wrong about a date that determines which rules applied to a contract signed in July or August.

Whether it will be enforced

That is the open question, and the people closest to it are saying so out loud. Commentary in Mmegi in August put it as reform on paper having to become reform in practice, depending on whether employers embrace the spirit of the law and whether the labour institutions can enforce standards fairly.

There is already a signal worth watching. In August the Minister said he was worried about a rise in retrenchments, which reads as employers acting before the new protections bit, and in September warned that employers failing to comply risk licence revocation.

What to actually do

If you are on a rolling three-month contract, or a probation that keeps being extended, or you were let go in probation without ever being told what was wrong, the law changed under you in September. That is worth a conversation with your employer or a union, and it is worth knowing before you sign the next thing.

If you work for yourself or for a foreign company, the Act matters to you differently, through a new presumption about who counts as a worker at all. That is covered in contractor or employee.

And if your arrangement has no contract, no leave and no notice regardless of how large the employer is, you are in the third of employment that informal work in Botswana describes. That is precisely the group the new presumption is aimed at.