The Okavango Research Institute offers a multi-disciplinary MPhil/PhD programme in Natural Resources Management. Okavango Research Institutes is a dynamic academic research institute of the University of Botswana initiates, coordinate and conducts research that promotes effective natural resources management, environmental management and environmental monitoring. The programme is offered on full and part time basis through minimal course work and research leading to a thesis/dissertation. The graduate programme offers students the opportunity to carry out a natural science or social science research-based higher degree in the unique environment of the Okavango and Kalahari regions.
Since inception in 2008, the MPhil/PhD programme has attracted over 40 students, enrolled for MPhil and PhD from the SADC region. The students come from government, private sector, NGOs, universities and other sectors of the society.
To produce graduate students with detailed knowledge and understanding of sustainable natural resource management especially of wetlands
The graduate programme provide the candidate with an enhanced research experience. Students conduct independent research, showing sound scholarship and constituting a substantial original contribution to the advancement of knowledge in a particular aspect of natural resources management science. The candidate is expected to have mastered advanced techniques in collecting, analysing and interpreting significant data sets, and should demonstrate wide knowledge and depth of understanding of literature in the field of study; develop a capacity for critical appraisal of existing facts, ideas and theories and be capable of producing an advanced treatise through the analysis and synthesis of the relevant data, concepts and theories.
The graduate programme is offered within the scope of the Okavango Research Institute’s five (5) Research Programmes. These are: