Most universities in Botswana are first generation, time to transform
For nearly sixty years, the story of Botswana has been written in carbon. Diamonds built the roads, filled the classrooms, staffed the clinics and raised a young nation into one of Africa’s steadiest economies. But at the launch of WeekendPost’s Botswana Diamond Jubilee publication at Travel Lodge in Gaborone this week, the University of Botswana’s Vice Chancellor, Professor David Norris, argued that the country has been asking itself the wrong question about what comes next.
“The question before Botswana should therefore not simply be, ‘What will replace diamonds?'” Professor Norris told the gathering. “That is too narrow. The more fundamental question is: ‘What kind of economy must Botswana build so that no single commodity can determine our economic destiny again?'”
His answer was unambiguous. The country’s future, he said, lies in “an innovation-driven economy – one driven by knowledge, research, innovation, technology, entrepreneurship, human capital, value addition and globally competitive services.” And at the centre of that transformation, he insisted, must stand its universities.
Yet Professor Norris was careful not to overstate the university’s solitary power. Government must build “an enabling policy and investment environment,” he said; industry must invest and create markets; financial institutions must supply capital; entrepreneurs must take risks; communities must participate. The university’s role is to furnish “the knowledge, skills, research, technology and talent around which this new economy can be built.” The futures of Botswana’s economy and its universities, he argued, have become “increasingly inseparable.”
Beyond the degree factory
Much of Professor Norris’s address was a meditation on what a university is actually for. He traced an evolution across generations of institutions: the First-Generation university concerned chiefly with transmitting existing knowledge; the Second-Generation research university that creates new knowledge; and the Third-Generation “entrepreneurial university” that commercialises research, develops intellectual property, spins out companies and binds itself tightly to industry.
“This is the transition that the University of Botswana is actively pursuing,” he said, describing an institution working to move from a predominantly teaching-and-research body toward one defined by “entrepreneurship, innovation, commercialisation, industry partnerships and stronger links between research and economic development.”
But he pressed further, toward what he called University 4.0 – a Fourth-Generation university that fuses “Teaching, Research, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Industry, Government, Communities and Technology.” Such an institution, he said, changes the questions it asks of itself: from “What can we teach?” to “What problems can we solve?”; from “How many papers have we published?” to “What has our research changed?”; and from “How many graduates have we produced?” to “What value are our graduates creating in the economy?”
The candour of his diagnosis was striking. Most universities in Botswana, he warned, remain First-Generation institutions built to teach rather than to discover – a condition he described as carrying “a profound risk.”
“A university that does not research risks teaching yesterday’s knowledge to tomorrow’s graduates,” Professor Norris said.
The graduate who is not a textbook
If the institution must change, so too must the classroom. Professor Norris called for a decisive shift away from “lecture-centred and memory-based learning towards problem-based, inquiry-driven and experiential learning,” arguing that artificial intelligence has already made the memorisation of facts a fragile foundation for a career.
“The university must therefore produce graduates who can think, question, analyse, adapt, create and solve problems,” he said, “rather than graduates who simply possess large amounts of information.”
He illustrated the point with a pair of contrasting questions. To ask an economics student to “Define entrepreneurship,” he said, tests recall. To ask instead, “Why do technically viable businesses in Botswana often fail commercially, and what would you do differently if you were starting one?” forces the student to weigh evidence, identify causes and defend a solution. An agriculture student, similarly, should be handed the case of a Central District farmer with land and water but no sustainable profit, and asked to diagnose and redesign the entire business model – integrating “agriculture, economics, climate, technology, markets, logistics, financing and entrepreneurship.”
The aim, he stressed, is not to abandon rigorous disciplinary foundations but to make knowledge “the means through which students solve problems, rather than the end in itself” – cultivating the critical thinking and entrepreneurial capability demanded by a knowledge-based economy.
The University as an economic engine
Professor Norris challenged what he called an “outdated conception” of the university as a mere consumer of public money. A modern university, he argued, is itself an economic institution: it employs staff, draws suppliers, attracts foreign exchange through international students, wins external research funding, generates intellectual property and hatches start-ups.
“The economic multiplier can therefore be enormous,” he said, pointing to Oxford, Waterloo, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford as universities whose influence radiates far beyond their campuses. The lesson, he cautioned, was not to imitate any one of them, but to grasp that “a university can become an economic platform around which industries, entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and government can organise.” UB, he noted, is already moving in that direction through its Unipod, industrial design work and emerging entrepreneurship initiatives; though he acknowledged the ecosystem “needs to become much stronger, more integrated and more commercially focused.”
The diamond lesson
Nowhere was Professor Norris’s argument sharper than on diamonds themselves. Despite decades as one of the world’s major producers, he said, Botswana has “not fully captured the enormous value that exists beyond mining.” He offered a stark comparison of the polished-diamond trade in 2021.
| Country | Approximate 2021 Value (US$) |
| India | 23.84 billion |
| United States | 14.37 billion |
| Hong Kong | 12.90 billion |
| Israel | 6.90 billion |
| Belgium | 3.57 billion |
| Botswana | 0.89 billion |
While Botswana is the source of so much of the world’s rough stone, it accounted for just $0.89 billion of the polished trade – a fraction of the value captured by nations with no diamond resource of their own.
“Some countries that do not possess Botswana’s diamond resource have built substantial economic activity around adding value to diamonds,” he observed, before posing the question that hung over the room: “Why could Botswana not have positioned the University of Botswana as a global centre for diamond cutting and polishing, jewellery design and manufacturing, diamond technology, mining engineering and related disciplines?”
The lesson, he said, extends well beyond gemstones – to renewable energy, financial technology, artificial intelligence, precision agriculture, biotechnology and water technology. “UB must become a university that is anticipatory of the economy Botswana needs to create,” he said, “rather than simply responsive to the economy that currently exists.”
Research that changes something
Research, Professor Norris argued, is “the engine of the transformation” – but he urged a rethinking of its purpose. Researchers must increasingly move from asking “What research can I publish?” to “What problem can my expertise help Botswana solve?” Without abandoning fundamental inquiry, he called for far stronger “problem-driven, mission-oriented and translational research,” tracing a value chain that runs from problem to research, prototype, intellectual property, commercialisation, enterprise, jobs and export revenue. Too often, he said, universities stop at publication. The more telling question is simpler: “What happened because of the research? Did a company emerge? Did a farmer increase productivity? Did a hospital reduce costs?”
The returns of reaching outward
Finally, Professor Norris made the case that a research-intensive university cannot be isolated, and he put numbers to the argument. Through the Michigan State University–African Alliance Partnership, he said, UB received more than P15 million between 2017 and 2024, with preliminary indications of a further P5 million or more for 2024–2026. Its partnership with Germany’s RPTU has generated support the university values at more than P6 million, with a further collaborative project approved through Erasmus+ in 2026. Tuition from University of Liberia students exceeded P2 million in 2026 alone, and a proposed engagement with Angola’s Agostinho Neto University carries direct revenue potential through English-language study.
The through-line of the evening was a nation at a crossroads and a university being asked to grow into a larger role. As Professor Norris put it, the future of Botswana’s economy and the future of its universities are now, more than ever, one and the same.
