The journey to school is one of the few public services a child uses every single day, and in parts of Botswana it has long run on donkey carts — slow, exposed and unsafe alongside motorised traffic. In February 2026, the Ministry of Local Government moved to change that, directing councils to provide safer learner transport and to phase out the unsafe donkey-cart arrangements that some communities have relied on to get children to the classroom.

The instruction reframes learner transport as a council responsibility rather than a household improvisation. Where families or schools have patched together their own solutions, the directive places the duty of safe conveyance with local government, and signals that the standard is no longer simply getting learners there, but getting them there safely. For councils, that turns an informal practice into a service to be planned, budgeted and delivered.

The stakes are practical and rural. Botswana’s settlement pattern is dispersed, and in remote districts the distance between home and the nearest school can be considerable. A donkey cart sharing a road with vehicles is a real hazard, and the phase-out acknowledges that access to education means little if the route to it puts children at risk. The harder question the directive raises is delivery: councils will need vehicles, routes and recurrent funding to honour it, and the gap between instruction and implementation is where such policies are usually won or lost. [TK: specific funding allocation or vehicle provision detail].

For Botswana’s operators and councils alike, the signal is clear enough. A government willing to legislate the safety of the school run is one that treats education access as a whole journey — and the test now is whether the budgets follow the directive to the last village road.