Botswana’s worsening unemployment crisis may be deeper than official figures suggest, with labour economist Abel Mapango arguing that thousands pushed out of work are disappearing into informal survival activities rather than being counted as unemployed. While the headline unemployment rate climbed to 21 percent in 2024/25, Mapango says many affected workers shifted into underemployment, casual work or exited the labour market altogether, masking the true extent of labour market deterioration.
The headline unemployment rate currently stands at 21 percent, up from 17.6 percent in 2015/16, according to data from Statistics Botswana’s Multi-Topic Household Survey 2024/25.
This translates to 213,437 persons without work, compared to 147,206 a decade ago, which is an increase of roughly 45 percent over the period.
A labour economist at the Institute for Labour and Employment Studies (ILES), Abel Mapango however, holds the view that the official figures do not tell the full story.
“Many of the resulting job losses are not immediately captured in formal unemployment statistics because affected workers often shift into underemployment, informal survival activities, or intermittent casual work,” Mapango said.
“This means labour market deterioration may actually be understated in official data.”
Mapango further told this publication that with government Purchase Order payments reported to have slowed, with monthly spending falling from approximately P1.14 billion to P584 million, small contractors and informal subcontractors lost income.
Instead many of those workers did not register as unemployed. They shifted into survival activities or withdrew from the labour market entirely, leaving no trace in the headline rate, as he highlighted that the structural cause runs deeper than the procurement slowdown.
Mapango estimated Botswana’s employment elasticity at approximately 0.45, meaning every one percent increase in GDP generates only about 0.45 percent employment growth.
With the Ministry of Finance projecting GDP growth of 3.1 percent for 2026, it “is therefore unlikely to materially reduce unemployment,” he noted.
“Botswana likely requires sustained annual growth rates closer to 5 – 6 percent, alongside active labour market interventions, to meaningfully absorb new entrants into the labour force,” Mapango said.
According to Mapango, the private sector outside mining has not expanded quickly enough to compensate, and the public sector has reached the limits of what fiscal consolidation allows.
The challenge, Mapango argues, is not simply achieving growth. “The challenge is therefore not simply economic growth itself, but the quality and composition of that growth,” he said.
“Botswana requires growth that is labour absorbing, productivity enhancing, and diversification driven rather than narrowly dependent on minerals and capital-intensive sectors.”
“The Botswana Economic Transformation Programme (BETP) can potentially mitigate some of these pressures if implementation prioritizes local labour-intensive enterprises, local procurement chains, and domestic value addition,” Mapango said, noting that, “if implementation becomes concentrated among large mechanized contractors with low-employment multipliers, the employment benefits may remain limited.”
Mapango says the path forward requires the government to hold two competing priorities at once.
“Balancing fiscal consolidation with employment creation and household welfare protection will remain critical,” he said.
“Without carefully coordinated policy intervention, there is a risk that structural unemployment, weak domestic demand, and rising inequality may become increasingly entrenched within the economy,” he warned.
