Jwaneng and Orapa are among the richest diamond mines on the planet, and the towns around them exist because of the mines: purpose-built communities with mine-run infrastructure and an internationally recruited technical workforce. The schooling in those towns is often decent and it is inevitably narrow — no company-town school can staff A-Level Further Mathematics for four pupils. Francistown, five hours from the capital, has little; Maun and the Delta have less. Gaborone has genuinely strong international schools at genuinely premium prices. This article is about everyone the campus map does not reach.
The problem is arithmetic, not quality
I want to be fair to Botswana’s schools, because the issue is not standards. A mine-town school with four hundred pupils cannot run A-Level Further Mathematics for three of them, or Physics for five, or Economics for two — not because the teaching is poor but because the numbers do not support a set. That is the single most common reason diamond-town families come to us, and it is a problem live delivery solves precisely: a group of five drawn from Jwaneng, Gaborone, Lusaka, and Windhoek is a full class, taught by a subject specialist, in a way no single town could assemble.
The boarding question, which families weigh every year
For decades the answer for a senior student in Jwaneng, Francistown, or Maun has been boarding — in Gaborone, or more often in South Africa. It works, and it costs a great deal more than fees alone: travel, holidays, and a fourteen-year-old living away from home for the years when most families would rather have them close. Live teaching does not suit every household, but it does change the question from "where do we send them" to "what do they need", which is a better question to be asking.
The rotational career, and why one pathway matters
Mining moves people. Jwaneng today, another operation in Africa, Australia, or Canada in three years, somewhere else after that. A child who changes school system with each move pays for it in curriculum alignment and sometimes a repeated year. A child on one live pathway — same teachers, same syllabus, same examination board — pays for none of them, because only the address changes. Cambridge A-Levels are read natively by UK universities through UCAS and accepted in 160+ countries, including the geoscience and mining-engineering programmes these families most often have in view.
The north and the Delta
Francistown is Botswana’s northern commercial hub and around five hours from Gaborone’s international tier. Beyond it, Maun and Kasane run a tourism and conservation economy that employs an internationally connected workforce in some of the most remote places we serve. For those families the calculation is the same as the mining one and sharper: identical live teaching delivered home, with examination travel a few times a year, against a child living several hundred kilometres away.
And where the local school is the right answer
A Motswana child settled in a good school, taking the BGCSE, heading toward the University of Botswana or a South African university does not need us — and because the BGCSE was developed in association with Cambridge, that route is genuinely well regarded. Our value here is narrow and real: the subjects a small school cannot staff, an English-medium international track where none exists locally, continuity across a rotational career, and an alternative to boarding a young teenager. Where none of that applies, the local school will serve a child well, and I would rather say so than sell around it.
Frequently Asked Questions
The mine school cannot offer A-Level Further Mathematics — can you?+
Yes, and it is the most common reason diamond-town families come to us. Subjects that are unviable for three or four pupils on a mine site run routinely in a live group of five.
Do we still need to keep our child enrolled at a registered school?+
That is our recommendation regardless of the compulsion question, which is unsettled in the sources. Keep the enrolment; run the Cambridge track alongside it. Smartious is not a registered Botswana school and does not replace one.
Our contract moves us to another country — does the schooling follow?+
Yes: the same curriculum, teachers, and examination board continue to the next operation anywhere in the world, with examinations sat at authorised centres wherever the family is.
How do class times work from Nairobi?+
Botswana is exactly one hour behind Kenya and neither country observes daylight saving, so classes land in the ordinary Botswana school day and afternoon every week of the year.
