The challenge
Lesotho’s land administration system is under strain. The Basotho (the people of Lesotho) own land, which is vested in the King. A leasehold system allocates land in two disconnected steps. Community Councils allocate and verify land locally, and the Land Administration Authority issues formal leases. Registering rural land is voluntary, costly and complex, so many landowners do not register. Officials also keep records manually, so duplicate allocations, unclear boundaries and disputes are common.
Women’s land rights are a key challenge. Despite legal reforms recognising women’s right to own and inherit land, custom in rural Lesotho still treats men as the rightful landholders. Our research found these norms remain strong, particularly around daughters’ rights to inherit land. As a result, women’s interests often go unregistered and are vulnerable if a husband dies or leaves the country for work. Local officials were also ill-equipped to apply the law. In Phamong, our capacity assessment found Land Allocation Subcommittee members had only primary school-level education and no prior land administration experience.
Our approach & role
Land Equity International led the consultancy with four Lesotho-based partners (RSDA, Gender Links, SI Futures and Survey and Digital Mapping) and Tetra Tech. Our work operated at two levels. First, we worked on the legal and institutional reforms behind Lesotho’s Rural Land Registration System, so that land allottees could obtain registered leases fairly and in line with new gender-equality reforms. Second, once a scheme had an anchor farmer, we would identify landholders, confirm land rights and issue allocation certificates. This work began in Phamong.
Our work focused on:
- Institutional and legal reform: we designed a new information technology system for rural land registration and standardised land allocation forms for Community Councils. We also drafted amendments aligning the Land Act 2010 with Lesotho’s new Administration of Estates and Inheritance Act 2024. Working with the Commissioner of Lands, we helped revise the national land use policy.
- Community engagement on gender norms: we led Gender Action Learning System workshops and other activities in Phamong, opening conversations aimed at shifting discriminatory gender norms around land.
- Capacity building and dispute resolution: we trained Community Councillors and land officials in land administration processes and in women’s and girls’ rights to land. We also designed a national fast-track mechanism for resolving land disputes, informed by interviews with courts, chiefs and land authorities.
- Land inventory and scheme decision-making: we designed and led a land inventory and socio-economic census in Phamong, with staff on site to protect vulnerable groups’ land rights and refer gender-based violence cases. Informed by our research into how households make farming decisions, we designed a Scheme Participation Decision-Making Plan setting out allottees’ options, from subleasing to the anchor farmer to consolidating land into a cooperative. The Plan aimed to make household participation informed and inclusive, so households could benefit from the new irrigation schemes rather than simply sell their land.
Results & impact
The MDIH stop-work order arrived in February 2025. By then, our team had trained 73 Community Councillors, land officials and their assistants in land and gender law (40 men and 33 women) and engaged more than 300 Basotho citizens on gender norms through Gender Action Learning System workshops.
With our resettlement partner, we completed a land inventory and socio-economic census of more than 100 households in Phamong. We could not complete the final step: issuing registered leases through the Land Administration Authority.
We submitted the Scheme Participation Decision-Making Plan and the revised national land use policy for approval but, due to the stop-work order, neither was implemented. Our client formally approved at least six technical deliverables. They included specifications for the new digital land registration system and a monitoring and evaluation framework with baselines for every project indicator.
