MASERU, Lesotho
A new Lesotho Poverty Assessment finds that poverty fell over a 15-year
period, but poverty remains widespread with nearly half of the population
living in poverty and 75 percent of the population either poor or vulnerable to
poverty, according to a joint report by the World Bank and the Lesotho Bureau
of Statistics released this week.
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| Lesotho Prime Minister, Tom Thabane |
The report, Lesotho Poverty Assessment: Progress and Challenges in
Reducing Poverty, finds
that Lesotho’s poverty rate fell from 56.6 percent to 49.7 percent between 2002
and 2017, driven by a reduction in inequality as a result of the expansion of
the country’s social protection programs and an increase in wage incomes among
the poor.
However, poverty and inequality remain persistently high due to the
country’s disparities in wage gaps and access to quality basic services.
“Poverty,
the most degrading, dehumanizing position any human being can find themselves
in, leaves the door wide open for injustice, inequality and the whole gamut of
human abuses,” said Hon.
Tlohelang Aumane, Lesotho Minister of Development Planning. “Every measure possible must be considered in
order to wipe out poverty in our nation.”
Among other key findings, the assessment shows that
between 2002 and 2017 inequality declined, making Lesotho more equal than its
neighbors. Yet with a Gini coefficient* of 44.6, the country remains one of the
20 percent most unequal countries in the world.
A profile of Lesotho’s poor shows that poverty
levels are highest among people living in rural areas, female-headed
households, the less educated, the unemployed, large families and children.
Urban areas experienced a 13-percentage point
reduction in poverty from 41.5 percent to 28.5 percent, while poverty stagnated
in rural areas, decreasing marginally from 61.3 percent to 60.7 percent.
Poverty increased in the Rural Highlands to 67.8 percent in 2017, an increase of
10.9 percentage points from 56.9 percent in 2002. It also increased in the
Rural Senqu River Valley.
“In
Lesotho more than 75 percent of the population is either poor or vulnerable,
indicating a need to change the country’s poverty trajectory,” said Marie Francoise Marie-Nelly, World
Bank Country Director for Lesotho. “The World Bank stands ready to support the Government of Lesotho in
line with our goals of reducing extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity
by 2030.”
The report recommends promoting reforms to create
an enabling environment for private sector job creation and improving
agricultural productivity through transitioning from subsistence to commercial
agriculture in the lowlands and foothills and creating a resilient landscape in
the highlands.
The report also suggests that
productivity-enhancing agricultural inputs and strengthening linkages between
farmers and buyers are critical to increase incomes. It points to the adoption
of investments in Climate Smart Agriculture, which offers the potential to
transform Lesotho’s agriculture into a more productive, climate-resilient and
low emissions sector.
*The Gini coefficient is a frequent measure of
inequality. It attains the value 0 if all resources are distributed equally,
and value of 100 if one person has all resources. - Africa
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