Making every Loti count for Lesotho’s future 

Dr Bjorn Lomborg 

LESOTHO stands at a crossroads. Economic fundamentals have improved, inflation has eased, and access to schooling has expanded, improving prospects for the future. Yet progress has also brought rising expectations. Young people want jobs and opportunities, education still needs to produce better learning outcomes, and while progress has been made against many infectious diseases, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic illnesses are becoming increasingly important health challenges. Agricultural production has rebounded after the historic 2024 drought, yet land-tenure insecurity remains a challenge for many farmers and rural communities. Much remains to be done, but budgets are limited. No government—no matter how rich—can do everything at once.  

The real question Lesotho needs to ask is: How do we make every loti deliver the greatest possible benefit? 

An important new initiative focused on Southern Africa will tackle exactly that challenge. Next month (15–17 July), top policy analysts from Lesotho, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe will gather in Johannesburg to explore how cost-benefit analysis can help governments achieve far better outcomes with existing resources. 

Cost-benefit analysis is a formalised way to distinguish effective policies from mediocre and poor ones. It identifies all costs and benefits of a policy over time — economic, social, and environmental — and translates them into present-day maloti. This allows policy-makers to compare alternatives and prioritise investments that deliver the greatest return for society. 

That matters because leaders everywhere face the temptation to promise everything to everyone. The UN Sustainable Development Goals, endorsed by Lesotho and every other nation, illustrate the challenge. They aim to end poverty, hunger, and disease while addressing war, climate change, corruption, inequality, biodiversity loss, and much more. Yet achieving all these ambitions would require more than ten trillion additional dollars annually — a completely unrealistic amount of additional resources. 

Every country must make difficult choices. Cost-benefit analysis does not tell democracies what to value; voters and elected leaders decide that. It simply helps identify which policies deliver the greatest impact for every loti spent. 

For more than two decades, my think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, has worked with hundreds of the world’s top economists, including several Nobel laureates, to identify the smartest investments. The evidence is striking: some interventions transform lives at remarkably low cost, while others consume vast resources for little benefit. 

In Johannesburg, more than 140 top analysts from across the region, including 21 Lesothan delegates from the Office of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning as well as seven other ministries, will participate in a three-day masterclass. They will apply cost-benefit thinking to challenges such as education, healthcare, agriculture, infrastructure, climate adaptation, water management, and housing. The goal is not more reports, but practical analyses tailored to local realities that can inform politicians, media, and voters. 

Consider education. World Bank estimates show that 97 percent of late-primary-age children in Lesotho are not proficient in reading. What should be done? Experience from around the world offers valuable lessons. Some education reforms are enormously expensive yet achieve little. In the early 2000s, Indonesia sharply increased education spending, largely through higher teacher salaries. While costly, later studies found virtually no improvement in student learning. 

Other approaches perform far better. Placing students in front of tablets with educational software one hour a day can dramatically increase learning, because it allows children to learn at their own pace and level. Large-scale studies consistently rank this as one of the most effective education policies. At relatively low cost it triples learning, delivering better student test scores and hence higher productivity and wages in adult life. On average, one loti returns 65 maloti in long-term benefits. In fact, our education cost-benefit analysis in Malawi helped convince the government to scale tablets nationally to all 1-4 grade students, because the benefits are phenomenally higher than the costs. 

Healthcare offers similar opportunities. High blood pressure is the world’s leading risk factor for death, yet treatment can be simple and inexpensive. Research shows that expanding diagnosis and treatment across low- and lower-middle-income countries could save nearly one million lives annually. Every loti invested would generate about 16 maloti in benefits. 

Similar high-impact opportunities exist in child vaccination, agricultural productivity, e-procurement to reduce corruption, and stronger land tenure security. The objective is not to spend more money, but to spend it better. 

The analysts attending the Johannesburg meeting will also learn to evaluate policies that are especially relevant to Lesotho. This can help voters, media, and policy-makers demand better use of scarce resources. Cost-benefit analysis is not about replacing democracy with spreadsheets. It is about making trade-offs visible, reducing waste, and focusing attention on the most effective solutions. 

In the years ahead, the countries that thrive won’t necessarily be those with the largest budgets. They will be those that achieve the greatest results with the resources they have. By embracing cost-benefit analysis, Lesotho can turn limited resources into lasting progress. 

Dr Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “Best Things First”.  

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