Every morning at 7am, women gather outside clothing factories in Maseru, the capital of the southern African mountain kingdom of Lesotho, hoping to be offered work. However, since Donald Trump imposed swingeing global tariffs in April 2025, those opportunities have been fewer and farther between.
Moleboheng Matsepe lost her full-time job sewing sports leggings for the California brand Fabletics in 2023. She was initially able to pick up three-month contracts, but has not had any work since September.
“The pressure is too much … We can’t even sleep at night,” said the 48-year-old, who supports five family members and now makes as little as 50 maloti (£2.23) a week doing occasional laundry jobs.
Lesotho’s garment industry employed 50,000 people at its peak in 2004, nurtured by the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), which was passed in 2000 and offered tariff-free access to the US market for thousands of African goods. Agoa, which needs to be renewed by the US Congress, expired at the end of September amid the US government shutdown.
According to the trade ministry, there are about 36,000 textile workers – mostly women – in the country, which is entirely landlocked by South Africa and has a population of 2.3 million. A third of those workers make clothes for the US, including jeans for Levi’s.
Wages are as low as 2,582 maloti (£115) a month. However, the jobs are still highly prized in a country where unemployment was 30% in 2024, according to official data.
Matsepe’s face lit up when asked if she had enjoyed her Fabletics job. “Everything that I wanted I would be able to do with the money that I got there. Also, when I worked there it was very nice. There was no harassment. It was very friendly.”
Last April, Trump announced “reciprocal” tariffs, based on the difference between what a country exported to and imported from the US. In 2024, Lesotho sold $237m of goods to the US and imported $2.8m.
Had the formula been implemented, Lesotho’s exports would have incurred a 50% tariff. Lesotho, which Trump claimed was a country no one had ever heard of, was being treated like a “pariah state”, said its trade minister, Mokhethi Shelile.
The tariff was eventually reduced to 15%, which has still chilled Lesotho’s economy. In June, the country’s central bank revised down its economic growth forecasts for 2025 and 2026 by 1 percentage point each, to 1.1% and 0.9% respectively.
A government survey in August, to which 12 out of 15 clothing companies exporting to the US responded, reported 400 lay-offs. Five companies were operating their factories at 5-30% capacity and three had stopped operating altogether.
At Ever Successful Textiles, hundreds of sewing machines churned out tottering piles of black Reebok sports tops for the US and pastel-coloured children’s leggings for South African retailers. However, only 80% of 470 machines were operational and the company had 550 staff compared with 650 in 2024, said its HR manager, Malefetsane Phahla.
Lesotho is exporting more to South Africa, but for much less money. Order forms showed Ever Successful Textiles receiving $5 (£3.71) per piece for a US order, compared with 5 rand (£0.23) for a South African one.
Shelile said: “We are busy looking at diversifying or moving more and more to the South African market without reducing what we are sending to the US.” He noted Lesotho still needed US dollars to import electricity, buy heavy machinery and maintain the loti currency’s peg to the South African rand.
On 10 December, the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives’ ways and means committee voted for a three-year extension to Agoa. Trump’s administration has said it only supports a year-long extension.
Shelile said he was hopeful the three-year Agoa renewal would be passed by both houses of Congress by the end of January and then signed by Trump, so that higher future tariffs could be avoided. However, the 15% “reciprocal” tariff would still apply. Shelile said that needed to be cut to 10%, the level of Eswatini, Ethiopia and Kenya, for Lesotho to remain competitive.
Meanwhile, every day women continue to wait outside factory gates, hoping for a job. Mapuseletso Makhake said she was struggling to pay for sanitary towels and school fees for her 15-year-old daughter, as well as providing for her 19-year-old son and sick, elderly father in her home village.
The 48-year-old had not worked since a two-month contract packing Reebok clothing in late 2024. As she spoke about the difficulties she had faced since losing her husband in the late 2000s, tears ran down her face. “My heart breaks every time, because I don’t like the life I am living … I wish I had still had my husband here to take the burden with me.”
• This article was amended on 8 January 2026. An earlier version included the Gap company as among those to source products from Lesotho. The company told us after publication that is not the case and this reference has been removed.
