Inside why Batswana are putting marriage on hold

staff writer | Monday September 21, 2026 06:00

Today, that order is changing. Batswana are still falling in love, living together, and having children, but many are marrying much later, whilst others are not marrying at all.

Statistics Botswana's latest figures show that just 4,517 marriages were registered in 2024, the lowest number recorded in a decade and 41% below the 7,631 recorded at the recent peak in 2021. The crude marriage rate has consequently slipped to just 1.8 marriages per 1,000 people.

Perhaps more worrying is the median age of marriage in Botswana, which is now estimated at 43 years for bachelors and 38 for spinsters. Just 0.5 percent of grooms who married in 2024 were aged between 20 and 24, whilst nearly a quarter were already 50 or older.

Despite the marriage goal post are moving further and further down the life ladder for many people, procreation has not ceased or slowed to match the trend. Of the 41,784 children born in 2024, a staggering 84.3% were born out of wedlock, with most of the non-marital births concentrated amongst women aged between 20 and 34.

Put together, the numbers suggest something more complex than a simple rejection of family life. Batswana are having relationships and children decades before the average first marriage.

Social scientists have been probing this trend for years now, and in a 2019 study on the transformation of marriage in Botswana, researchers Tshepo Mathafeni and Setenay Nil Doğan published a paper indicating that declining marriage was being accompanied by increased cohabitation and a gradual weakening of the authority traditionally exercised by families over whom their children married.

Their study argued that modernisation, education, urbanisation and Botswana's transition from an agricultural to a cash economy had changed not only marriage rates, but the institution itself.

In the traditional setting, marriage was a relationship between families rather than simply individuals. Parents played a significant role in the process, and bogadi, traditionally paid in cattle, helped legitimise the union and establish relationships between the families.

The researchers argued that the fading away of family influence on the institution of marriage had left the institution to individualistic whims and thus the decline.

“Emphasis on education and self-fulfilment is now at the core of who should get married to whom, when, and why. As a result, the age at first marriage is rising and has been for the last couple of decades,” they shared in the research paper.

Another factor identified is that the expansion of education opportunities, particularly for women, has increased the chances of living and thriving outside the institution of marriage. Women are now spending more time in school, entering formal employment, and establishing independent incomes before considering marriage.

University of Botswana scholar, Zitha Mokomane, has studied the growth of couples living together without formalising their unions.

Her research found that cohabitation in Botswana was not necessarily evidence that people had abandoned the aspiration to marry. Instead, for many couples, living together appeared to function as a stage preceding marriage, with the problem being that it could last forever, and that is forever literally.

“The results clearly show that in Botswana, marriage is the ultimate life goal for virtually all cohabitants whilst cohabitation is a compromise living arrangement for those who are not yet ready for marriage.” “For many cohabitants, marriage is a distant goal that will be attained once the current constraints are overcome,” Mokomane revealed.

Mokomane concluded that rising cohabitation did not necessarily threaten marriage as an institution, but contributed to delaying when marriage actually happened.

That distinction helps explain the apparent contradiction in today's numbers.

A child being born 'outside wedlock' does not necessarily mean the child is being raised by a single parent or that the parents have rejected marriage. Statistics Botswana's classification captures the mother's legal marital status, not necessarily whether she is in a stable cohabiting relationship.

What the figures do demonstrate is that marriage has largely ceased to be a prerequisite for starting a family.

In 2016, 72% of births were outside wedlock. By 2018, the proportion had climbed to 81% and reached 84% in 2020. It has remained around that level ever since.

Beyond what researchers have found, there could be one more apparent obstacle, which is that the cost of a wedding plus the cost of sustaining a marriage has drastically changed from back in the day.

Traditional marriage required minimal resources, including bogadi, but it is obvious that the modern wedding has accumulated an additional layer of expenditure and social expectation of glee and splendour.

The white gown, decorated venue, catering of delicacies, photography, elaborate invitations, bridal parties, honeymoons and much more, depending on how well you want to keep up with the Joneses, have turned marriage into an expensive financial undertaking.

Weddings are now a whole economic industry littered with wedding planners, photographers, bridal wear businesses and a host of other service providers.

The price of traditional practices such as bogadi has also been inflationary. Traditionally understood as an appreciation to the bride's family and a mechanism linking two families, researchers have found that bogadi has become increasingly monetised, with cash now accepted alongside cattle and some families demanding higher payments.

Anthropologists Jacqueline Solway, Rijk van Dijk, and Julia Pauli have separately examined this changing economics of marriage in Southern Africa and Botswana.

Solway describes contemporary Botswana as a society in which relatively few people marry and where marriage has increasingly become associated with the middle class. The long process through which families traditionally constructed a marriage has also contracted into much shorter ceremonies and exchanges, something she terms the movement from “slow marriage” towards “fast bogadi”.

Pauli and van Dijk identify the rising cost of bride prices and increasingly elaborate wedding celebrations as important explanations for declining marriage rates.

“We can easily identify a number of important explanations for the decline in marriage. One is a strong rise in the costs of marrying,” the researchers observed.