Botswana Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

REFUSAL, AND THE REFUSAL IS THE ANSWER: BOTSWANA HAS NO CONTRIBUTORY NATIONAL SOCIAL-INSURANCE SCHEME. There is no state pension contribution, no unemployment-insurance contribution, no national health-insurance contribution, no maternity or sickness fund contribution and no state workmen's-compensation fund contribution. For an ordinary private-sector employee there is NO statutory payroll deduction of any kind other than PAYE, and NO statutory employer social-insurance contribution. An engine that returns a percentage for Botswana is fabricating it; an engine that returns nothing at all and treats the country as unresearched is also wrong. The correct answer is zero, for a structural reason. WHAT EXISTS INSTEAD, AND UNDER WHAT LAW: 1. OCCUPATIONAL INJURY IS COVERED BY COMPULSORY PRIVATE INSURANCE, NOT BY A STATE FUND. Under the Worker's Compensation Act, Cap. 47:03, s31(1): "every employer shall insure and keep himself insured with such insurers as may be approved by the Commissioner in respect of any liability which he may incur under this Act to any worker employed by him." The employer's liability to compensate the injured worker is direct and personal; the insurance requirement is a solvency backstop, and the premium is a commercial insurance premium negotiated with an approved insurer — NOT a statutory percentage of payroll and NOT a contribution to any fund. There is therefore no rate to serve. s31(2) exempts the Government. s31(3) lets an employer deposit money or furnish other security with the Commissioner instead of insuring. s31(4) makes failure to insure an offence punishable by a fine not exceeding P5 000 or three years' imprisonment or both, and s31(5) leaves the employer personally liable for the compensation as a debt to the worker regardless. Because the premium is set by the insurer per risk, there is no national figure — this is a different structure from Tanzania's WCF, Zambia's WCFCB or South Africa's Compensation Fund, all of which are state funds financed by a statutory levy. 2. SEVERANCE IS THE STATUTORY SUBSTITUTE FOR AN UNEMPLOYMENT BRANCH, AND IT IS A TERMINAL PAYMENT, NOT A CONTRIBUTION. Under s28 of the Employment Act, Cap. 47:01, an employee with at least 60 months (five years) of continuous service with the same employer is entitled on termination to a severance benefit accruing at one day's basic pay for each month of the first 60 months of continuous employment, and two days' basic pay for each month thereafter. Nothing is paid in, monthly or otherwise; the liability crystallises at termination. Employees receiving a pension or gratuity, or both, are excluded. An accrual for this belongs in the employer's provisioning model, never on the payslip as a contribution. 3. THE OLD-AGE PENSION IS UNIVERSAL AND NON-CONTRIBUTORY. Botswana pays a flat monthly Old Age Pension to every citizen aged 65 and above resident in Botswana, funded entirely from general government revenue and wholly unconnected to employment or to any contribution record. Entitlement turns on citizenship, age and a valid national identity card, not on a contribution history. It is therefore not a social-insurance branch and generates no payroll line. 4. RETIREMENT SAVING IS VOLUNTARY AND OCCUPATIONAL. Botswana has a large and well-regulated occupational pension-fund sector supervised by the Non-Bank Financial Institutions Regulatory Authority, and the Botswana Public Officers Pension Fund covers public officers. Membership and contribution rates are matters of contract between employer and employee, not of statute — typical rates circulate in the market but they are NOT statutory and are not served here. An engine must take the rate from the individual scheme's rules, and must not present any market-typical figure as a statutory rate. 5. THERE IS NO NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE. Medical cover is private and voluntary. WHAT IS NOT A SOCIAL CONTRIBUTION BUT IS OFTEN MISFILED AS ONE: the Training Levy administered by the Botswana Unified Revenue Service under the vocational-training legislation is levied on a business's TURNOVER, not on its payroll and not per employee. It is a business tax with no employee dimension, no individual account and no benefit, and it is deliberately not modelled here, at any rate. Do not convert it into a payroll percentage. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: none, and none possible — there is nothing to vary. No district or council levies any payroll or social-insurance charge. WHAT WOULD CHANGE THIS RECORD: Botswana has discussed a national social-security or pension scheme for many years without enacting one. If a contributory scheme is legislated, this record moves from a refusal to a priced branch list. Until then, the effective_from field is null because there is no commencement date for a scheme that does not exist, and current.value is null because there is no rate — not because the rate is unknown. SOURCING CAVEATS, STATED PLAINLY: the Worker's Compensation Act was read in full from the consolidated Laws of Botswana print, and s31 is quoted verbatim above. The Employment Act s28 severance formula and the Old Age Pension's universal, non-contributory character are stated from the Government of Botswana's own published descriptions and consistent labour-law sources rather than from a verbatim reading of s28 and the pension instrument; nothing in this refusal turns on their exact numbers, since neither generates a contribution. No instrument establishing any contributory national scheme was found, because none exists.

Get it programmatically

curl https://afriref.dev/v1/bw/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://afriref.dev/v1/bw/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://afriref.dev/provenance/bw/social-contributions

Other Botswana series: Monetary Policy Rate (MoPR) · VAT standard rate · VAT registration threshold · Minimum wage (general hourly rate, scheduled trades) · Public holidays · CPI inflation (year-on-year) · Corporate income tax rate · Withholding tax rates · Prescribed rate of interest · Personal income tax brackets (resident individuals)

The same figure elsewhere: Burkina Faso · Cameroon · Central African Republic · Chad · Côte d'Ivoire · all 34