Page last updated on February 28, 2018

Population:
1,958,042
note: estimates for this country explicitly take into account the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS; this can result in lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, higher death rates, lower population growth rates, and changes in the distribution of population by age and sex than would otherwise be expected (July 2017 est.)
country comparison to the world: 148
[see also: Population country ranks ]

Nationality:
noun: Mosotho (singular), Basotho (plural)
adjective: Basotho

Ethnic groups:
Sotho 99.7%, Europeans, Asians, and other 0.3%

Languages:
Sesotho (official) (southern Sotho), English (official), Zulu, Xhosa

Religions:
Christian 80%, indigenous beliefs 20%

Demographic profile:
Lesotho faces great socioeconomic challenges. More than half of its population lives below the property line, and the country’s HIV/AIDS prevalence rate is the second highest in the world. In addition, Lesotho is a small, mountainous, landlocked country with little arable land, leaving its population vulnerable to food shortages and reliant on remittances. Lesotho’s persistently high infant, child, and maternal mortality rates have been increasing during the last decade, according to the last two Demographic and Health Surveys. Despite these significant shortcomings, Lesotho has made good progress in education; it is on-track to achieve universal primary education and has one of the highest adult literacy rates in Africa. Lesotho’s migration history is linked to its unique geography; it is surrounded by South Africa with which it shares linguistic and cultural traits. Lesotho at one time had more of its workforce employed outside its borders than any other country. Today remittances equal about 17% of its GDP. With few job options at home, a high rate of poverty, and higher wages available across the border, labor migration to South Africa replaced agriculture as the prevailing Basotho source of income decades ago. The majority of Basotho migrants were single men contracted to work as gold miners in South Africa. However, migration trends changed in the 1990s, and fewer men found mining jobs in South Africa because of declining gold prices, stricter immigration policies, and a preference for South African workers. Although men still dominate cross-border labor migration, more women are working in South Africa, mostly as domestics, because they are widows or their husbands are unemployed. Internal rural-urban flows have also become more frequent, with more women migrating within the country to take up jobs in the garment industry or moving to care for loved ones with HIV/AIDS. Lesotho’s small population of immigrants is increasingly composed of Taiwanese and Chinese migrants who are involved in the textile industry and small retail businesses.

Age structure:
0-14 years: 32.12% (male 316,106/female 312,869)
[see also: Age structure - 0-14 years country ranks ]
15-24 years: 19.43% (male 181,481/female 199,039)
[see also: Age structure - 15-24 years country ranks ]
25-54 years: 37.94% (male 362,798/female 380,001)
[see also: Age structure - 25-54 years country ranks ]
55-64 years: 5.01% (male 52,293/female 45,828)
[see also: Age structure - 55-64 years country ranks ]
65 years and over: 5.5% (male 55,163/female 52,464) (2017 est.)

NOTE: 1) The information regarding Lesotho on this page is re-published from the 2018 World Fact Book of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. No claims are made regarding the accuracy of Lesotho People 2018 information contained here. All suggestions for corrections of any errors about Lesotho People 2018 should be addressed to the CIA.
2) The rank that you see is the CIA reported rank, which may habe the following issues:
  a) The assign increasing rank number, alphabetically for countries with the same value of the ranked item, whereas we assign them the same rank.
  b) The CIA sometimes assignes counterintuitive ranks. For example, it assigns unemployment rates in increasing order, whereas we rank them in decreasing order

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