What Botswana’s Youth Schemes Have Actually Delivered

Botswana spends real money on getting young people into work. The National Internship Programme alone was warranted P184.9 million in a single financial year. What is much harder to find is evidence of what that spending produces, and the gap between the two is the story.

The internship programme, as it is actually offered

It is open to unemployed citizen graduates under 35, placing them for a maximum of two years, run by the Department of Employment Services. Selection is first-come by vacancy, qualification and place of service, and one transfer is allowed after three months.

On the allowance, the published record disagrees with itself. A Department of Employment Services confirmation letter dated 8 January 2026 states a monthly living allowance of P2,000. Interns who petitioned government in April 2026 said the allowance was P1,900 and asked for P4,000. We are printing both rather than picking one.

The petition is worth reading beyond the number. Interns raised stagnant allowances, programme guidelines dating from 2016, limited career progression, being underused on tasks unrelated to their qualifications, and the suspension of female interns’ pay during maternity leave.

The success rate nobody has updated

Search for whether the internship works and you will find that 62% of interns gained permanent employment. That figure was given by the programme’s acting director in February 2014, when 4,091 interns had been placed.

The most recent figure we could verify at all is from March 2015: more than 4,500 interns enrolled, with over a quarter permanently absorbed. Note that this is a materially lower rate than the 2014 claim, and that both are now more than a decade old.

In July 2025 the Minister launched consultations to revamp the programme, proposing formal contracts for interns, more private sector placements, international placements and routes to permanent absorption. That is an admission that the current design is not delivering, which is more informative than either old percentage.

The youth fund, and the money that did not come back

The Youth Development Fund has run since 2009/10, funding citizens aged 18 to 35 who are out of school, unemployed or earning under P2,500 a month, on a 50% grant and 50% loan basis, with applications called annually between May and June.

The clearest performance data is from 2021/22: 8,383 applications, 813 funded, P81.8 million committed and P79.8 million disbursed by February 2022. Loan repayments that year were P4.63 million against a P4 million target, and 1,133 businesses were monitored against a target of 1,220.

Against that, a Permanent Secretary told the Public Accounts Committee that P400 million in loans was uncollected, and said the ministry had no plans to force repayment. A peer-reviewed evaluation of Botswana’s youth empowerment programmes concluded that policy implementers lacked the capacity to help young people realise socio-economic empowerment, and that grantees had struggled to turn grants into functioning businesses.

What the audits found

The Auditor General’s findings are about administration rather than outcomes, and they are not reassuring. Contracts with two banks to pay internship and national service allowances ran for about twenty months without a signed agreement in place, which the Auditor General described as not procedural and a risk to government resources. In 2020/21 the internship programme underspent its warrant by P14.2 million, 8%.

The Auditor General’s report on the 2022/23 accounts, transmitted to the Minister of Finance in February 2026, adds two findings worth knowing before you apply to either scheme. The Youth Development Fund was running its records in three places at once — an information management system, the government accounting system and Excel spreadsheets — which produced inconsistent figures for the same beneficiary, in one case repayments recorded as P11,000 in Excel, P21,000 in the system and P20,600 in the manual file. The report also found no documented access control policy, one officer able to capture, edit and record payments without independent authorisation, and 103 interns, participants and volunteers below the age of 15 captured in a programme restricted to ages 15 to 35.

The same report found that the Tourism Industry Training Fund, established to fund skills development and pay allowances to youths and interns in that sector, "did not achieve its primary objective as no training activities were conducted, and no allowances were paid to youths or interns", an inactivity it says has persisted since 2021 "despite the availability of resources".

Note the lag: this is a report on the year ended March 2023, signed off in February 2026. The broader pattern of promised jobs and audited delivery is in every jobs number Botswana has been promised.

How to use a scheme like this anyway

None of this says do not apply. An internship at P2,000 a month is more than no income, and placements do convert. It says apply with clear eyes.

• Treat the placement as a source of evidence and contacts, not as a queue that ends in a job, because the absorption data to support that is ten years old
• Get the scope of work in writing at the start, since being underused is the most common complaint from interns themselves
• If the fund is the goal, note that fewer than one in ten applications was funded in the year with published figures
• Check the guidelines you are given against their date, because government lists the youth policy and fund guidelines as under review

The wider market these schemes are placing people into is described in Botswana’s two unemployment rates, and what the work pays once you are in it in what official data says Batswana earn.