Lesotho National Human Development Report: Summary

The Lesotho population is estimated at 1.89 million, with male to female sex ratio of 1.03 (97 males to 100 females), occupying 30,555 km2. The country is very young demographically, and nearly 40 percent of the people in Lesotho are aged between 15 and 35 years and constitute a youth bulge. More than 70 percent of Lesotho’s population resides in rural areas and engage in agriculture in varied degrees though agriculture accounts for only around 7 percent of GDP, which in part explains high-income inequality, with Palma ratio of 3.9.

Lesotho‘s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is about 2.5 billion dollars, and the economy grew on average by 4.5 per cent in the last 5 years, but is likely to slow down to around 2.5 percent in the medium term. The share of the main economic activities as the share of total GDP are as follows: real estate and business services (12.6 percent), manufacturing (10.3 percent, 6.8 percent of which is textiles), wholesale and retail (8.6 percent), public administration (8.4 percent), financial intermediation (7.2 percent), agriculture (7 percent), education (5.8 percent), post and telecommunication (5.4 percent), and mining and quarrying (5.2 percent). The fastest growing sectors are mining, financial intermediation, construction and public administration. Since the global economic crisis set in, Lesotho has not been able to generate significant new jobs, hence high Youth unemployment at 30.5 percent. The growth trajectory reflects an urgent need to adopt policies that will propel growth and result in mass job creation in the private sector.