Strengthening Gender-lens Investing and PPD in Lesotho

Context

In Lesotho, a lot has been done to progress towards gender equality. However, gender inequalities persist, particularly when looking at access and use of financial services, promoting women entrepreneurs, and gender-based legal restrictions. The country ranked regionally high in the Women, Business and the Law 2023 index, scoring a 78.1 out of 100 points. One area of improvement is entrepreneurship (75), indicating constraints for women starting and running a business.

Interested in advancing the gender equality progress in Lesotho, the Lesotho National Development Corporation (LNDC) is seeking to improve gender sensitivity of the Corporation’s financing operations as well as strengthening its capacity to organize and engage in public-private dialogue (PPD) processes.

Objective

The ICR Facility provides expertise and technical assistance to LNDC to improve gender-lens investing and access to finance for women and to recommend a way forward for LNDC’s PPD processes in order to create better business conditions, especially for women.

This intervention comprises two areas of support:

Improving gender-lens investing: Conducting an institutional gender assessment of the LNDC, performing market research on women entrepreneurs, developing a gender strategy, recommending refinement of financial services, and conducting a gender training for the LNDC staff.
Strengthening PPD processes: Reviewing and analysing the PPD environment and experiences in Lesotho, including a gender-gap analysis and gap analysis of the LNDC’s secretariat function, as well as developing a PPD roadmap including recommendations for improvements.

Overall, this ICR Facility intervention is providing LNDC with the tools, expertise, and competences to enable more accessible and well-targeted financing for women, and engage stakeholders to enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of business environment reforms through PPD.

Results

The LNDC is the main parastatal of the Government of Lesotho charged with the implementation of the country’s industrial development policies. Making strides in engendering LNDC will eventually lead to trickle down a gender-lens in the overall Lesotho economy. The program conducted and institutional gender assessment of the LNDC, which highlighted gaps where the DFI can improve its operations internally and externally. The more gender aware and responsive the DFI is itself, the better it and its staff member can serve its women clients. A market research report and gender strategy recommended several steps for LNDC to take in its approach to reach more women financially, including encouraging LNDC to become a thought leader and the link in bringing its relevant partners and stakeholders together, who have the same goal of empowering women entrepreneurs, to promote a holistic approach. Ultimately, taking forward the recommendations will increase the economic participation of women, create more jobs, reduce poverty, and attract outside investments to distribute even more resources to women and youth entrepreneurs in the country.