The need to equip primary, secondary and tertiary levels with academically and professionally
qualified teachers has been a major concern for many developing countries since the early
1960s. Initiatives to train teachers via the conventional mode have eluded many countries due
to limited resources. As a result these countries have experimented with various delivery
modes, among them, part time evening classes and distance education. Distance education is
selected because of its cost effectiveness in expanding access to educational opportunity
without having to set up additional physical structures. It also affords aspirants, lifelong
learning where people can learn what they want without foregoing their other social,
economic and other activities.
But the ever evolving forms of learning, varied and challenging learner characteristics, limited
academic space, limited personnel and the growth of new and fairly often unaffordable
technologies have prompted governments to forge partnerships to share the limited human,
physical and material resources in the provision of teacher education beyond institutional
walls. While institutions generally agree on shared use of resources in order to arrest, poverty
perpetrating factors, the dynamics involved demand a change in the organizational behaviour
so as to avoid any conflicts during the process. This paper therefore discusses the dynamics of
resource sharing in expanding in-service teacher education from the pre- independece to postindependence
era in Botswana. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how distance
education has been applied in the training and upgrading of teachers in Botswana as a
measure to counter, poverty, ignorance and disease.