🇧🇮 49 institutions · 67,439 students · 2025/26
Higher education in Burundi — every institution and programme the ministry counts.
5 public and 44 private universities, institutes and seminaries, with their students in 2025/26, every programme they reported with its number of students and women, the split between professional and academic tracks, foreign students by nationality, and enrolment each year since 2021/22.
Students, 2025/26
67,439
49.4% women
At public institutions
25.7%
17,347 students; 13,596 at the Université du Burundi
In professional programmes
23.6%
15,912 students; 389 programme listings
Foreign students, 2025/26
11,852
17.6% of all students
What it costs, how to get in, and what isn't here
Tuition fees are not in the ministry's yearbook and are not published as open data, for public or private institutions. Ask each institution for its current fees, including any rate for students from abroad.
Entry to higher education requires the Diplôme d'État (the national secondary-school examination); applicants educated abroad need a qualification recognised as equivalent.
The ministry's yearbook gives students per institution and programme by sex, and foreign students by nationality, but no fees, admission requirements or graduate outcomes — so this is a directory, not a matcher. Its graduate and teaching-staff tables are not used here.
All figures are for the 2025/26 academic year, from the ministry's Recensement académique, mai 2026 (the yearbook is dated August 2026).
Public institutions (5)
17,347 students in 2025/26. Listed alphabetically, not ranked.
| Institution | Students, 2025/26 | Women | Programmes | Foreign |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| École Normale SupérieureENS · Bujumbura Mairie · Ntahangwa | 2,611 | 30.8% | 3 | 2 |
| Institut National de Santé PubliqueINSP · Bujumbura Mairie · Mukaza | 773 | 53.0% | 9 | 0 |
| Institut Supérieur de PoliceISP · Bubanza · Bubanza | 161 | 9.9% | 2 | 0 |
| Institut Supérieur des Cadres MilitairesISCAM | 206 | 7.3% | 2 | 0 |
| Université du BurundiUB · Bujumbura Mairie · Mukaza | 13,596 | 40.0% | 29 | 116 |
Private institutions (44)
50,092 students in 2025/26: universities, institutes and seminaries. Listed alphabetically, not ranked.
The yearbook counts 49 institutions (5 public, 44 private); all 49 are listed here. Each institution's students are from the yearbook's table by type of programme, whose rows add up to the national total of 67,439. Its shorter per-institution table gives different totals for EALI (1,251 rather than 1,287) and ISPG (1,115 rather than 1,105), and its rows add up to 67,413, not 67,439. The seat (province and commune) and the year of authorisation are from the list of institutions in the ministry's 2022/23 yearbook — the 2025/26 yearbook has no such list — so institutions not on it show none. “Bujumbura Mairie” is the city of Bujumbura. Campuses may be elsewhere.
Students in Burundi, 2021/22–2025/26
All higher-education institutions, each year as the yearbook's historical table reports it.
Earlier years are from the yearbook's historical table, whose institution rows add up to its own national totals in every year. Those totals differ from the yearbook's summary table for earlier years (2021/22: 66,338 against 65,326; 2022/23: 66,868 against 67,373; 2023/24: 65,861 against 66,150; 2024/25: 73,247 against 73,343). A dash means the table gives no figure for that year.
Foreign students, 2025/26
9,274 foreign students (78.2% of those in the table's rows) are at one institution, Université Espoir d'Afrique, where they are 86.4% of its students. By nationality (our sums over the institutions' rows):
- Congolese (DR Congo)11,712 · 98.8%
- Other nationalities75 · 0.6%
- Rwandan29 · 0.2%
- Tanzanian28 · 0.2%
- Kenyan12 · 0.1%
Foreign students are counted by nationality as each institution or campus reported it. The yearbook's national total is 11,852; its campus rows add up to 11,854. An institution with no row in that table has no foreign students recorded. Nationalities other than Congolese, Rwandan, Tanzanian and Kenyan are grouped as “other”.
Programmes (filières) are listed as each institution reported them to the ministry, in French or English, with marks such as “(Bac)”, “(Inst)” or “(Master)” as printed. Campuses are not shown, so a programme taught at several campuses appears once for each. The Université du Burundi and the École Normale Supérieure report by faculty, institute or department. Where a programme's printed women and men don't add up to its printed total (one row), the total is shown and the share of women is left blank.
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Source: Ministère de l'Education Nationale et de la Recherche Scientifique (Burundi), Bureau de la Planification et des Statistiques de l'Éducation, “Annuaire des statistiques de l'éducation 2025-2026, Tome 3 : statistiques de l'enseignement supérieur” (August 2026), from its Recensement académique, mai 2026; https://mesrs.gov.bi/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/TOME-3_Annuaire_2025-2026.pdf, read on 2026-10-20. Seats and years of authorisation: the ministry's 2022-2023 yearbook (Tome 3), list of institutions. The figures were re-keyed and arranged by CollegeMatcher: shares, sums over nationalities, English labels and the notes on figures that disagree are our work; institution and programme names are the yearbook's. Only the figures are used here, not the yearbook's tables or text. Open the yearbook (PDF)