Lesotho in Peril

The Kingdom of Lesotho is a country in peril. I am not telling you anything that you do not already know, but it needs to be said. Unemployment is at 45% and as if that wasn’t enough, almost half of the country is below the poverty line of an income of less than $1.25 per day. GDP growth is in a downward spiral over the past few years. In 2007 GDP was at 5.2%, then dropped to 3.9% in 2008 and dropped again in 2009 to 1.6%. This trend cannot continue if the people of Lesotho want to improve their quality of life.

The CIA World Factbook has an important measurement of wealth distribution. It is called the “Distribution of Family Income – GINI index.” They define this index as: “This index measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country. The index is calculated from the Lorenz curve, in which cumulative family income is plotted against the number of families arranged from the poorest to the richest…If income were distributed with perfect equality, the Lorenz curve would coincide with the 45 degree line and the index would be zero; if income were distributed with perfect inequality, the Lorenz curve would coincide with the horizontal axis and the right vertical axis and the index would be 100.” On this scale, Lesotho has a rating of 63.2, which is the 3rd highest in the world. Solving one of the problems that I brought up earlier, which is the percentage of people below the poverty line should help this problem as well.

Currently, healthcare is a huge problem. The World Health Organization (WHO) has a minimum standard of 20 doctors per 100,000 people, but Lesotho has only 5. Nurses are not any better, with 63 per 100,000 and a WHO standard of 100. Being that AIDS is such an issue, the improvement of this ratio needs to made to be a top priority. AIDS have caused the life expectancy of a citizen of Lesotho to drop to around 40, one of the worst in the world. With 23% of people in Lesotho having AIDS, it is the 3rd...