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NCBNational Capability Benchmark
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Challenge the benchmark

Choose a score and give the benchmark a specific reason to reconsider it.

When you submit, the form attaches the current score and confidence for the country and capability you chose.

Submissions are public and start as awaiting review. A maintainer can add a response and signature after review.

Where does Lesotho stand on Learning?

Dataset 9.3.0

This page reads one capability from the published data and is recomputed with every release. It separates what Lesotho does, which makes the score, from what the country has, which sits beside the score, and places the country among the 10 countries at the nearest income. The text describes the data and recommends no policy.

What does the score rest on?

Score32.4Confidence0.54usable evidence

The Learning score is the equal-weight mean of the positions of three indicators on a 0 to 100 scale that every country sets together. Confidence measures the evidence behind the score and sits beside it as a second number.

The Learning score tracks GDP per capita at r = 0.71 across 123 countries.

Observed indicators

  • Human Capital Index

    0.4 index 0-1

    World Bank (HD.HCI.OVRL), 2020

    Position on the scale14.6Peer median11.89 peers with a value

  • Firms offering formal training

    33.1 % of firms

    World Bank (IC.FRM.TRNG.ZS), 2023

    Position on the scale39.6Peer median23.09 peers with a value

  • Research citation impact

    0.99 ratio to world average

    OpenAlex (citation_normalized_percentile.is_in_top_10_percent), 2021

    Position on the scale43.0Peer median60.010 peers with a value

No comparable source yet, so lowering confidence: adult learning participation.

What Lesotho has to work with

Beside each condition, two r values read every country at once, one against income and one against the capability score. Where the r with income is much higher than the r with the score, having the condition goes with being rich more than with the capability measured.

Conditions, not scored

What the country has to work with on this capability. The values are shown as the source published them and are not part of the score, the confidence or the trend. The rank counts the countries with a value, best first.

  • Tertiary enrolmentWorld Bank (SE.TER.ENRR), 2018

    9.9 % gross, rank 108 of 124. Gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education.

    A condition, not scored: enrolment counts people in formal education and records nothing learned (D122).

    • r with income: 0.82 (122 countries)
    • r with the Learning score: 0.62 (122 countries)
    • Peer median: 4.9 % gross (10 peers with a value)

  • Public education expenditureWorld Bank (SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS), 2024

    6.6 % of GDP, rank 9 of 125. Government expenditure on education as a share of GDP.

    A condition, not scored: public spending on education is a pure input, and learning is what the dimension asks about (D122).

    • r with income: 0.31 (123 countries)
    • r with the Learning score: 0.29 (123 countries)
    • Peer median: 3 % of GDP (10 peers with a value)

  • Vocational share of secondaryWorld Bank (SE.SEC.ENRL.VO.ZS), 2017

    2.1 % of secondary, rank 108 of 125. Vocational pupils as a share of total secondary enrolment.

    A condition, not scored: the share of secondary pupils on a vocational track describes how a school system is built, not what anyone learns in it, and higher is not unambiguously better (D141). It marks a route into skilled work that does not run through university. Learning reads research citation impact, firm training and the human capital index instead.

    • r with income: 0.5 (123 countries)
    • r with the Learning score: 0.39 (123 countries)
    • Peer median: 4.3 % of secondary (10 peers with a value)

Where does Lesotho sit among its peers?

The peers are the 10 countries at the nearest income. Income is GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, in constant international dollars, for the latest year the World Bank publishes, and distance is measured on a log scale, where half and double are equally far. No country is picked by hand, and the set changes when the data does.

In this release peer income runs from US$ 2,625 to US$ 3,821, and Lesotho has US$ 2,721 (2025).

0255075100Lesotho
  • Solid ring: usable or good evidence
  • Broken ring: thin evidence, opening further as confidence falls
  • The shaded band is the middle half of the set and the line inside it is the median.
  • Guinea-Bissau: 41.4
  • Gambia: 37.6
  • Haiti: 35.5
  • Rwanda: 35.1
  • Uganda: 34.7
  • Tanzania: 32.6
  • Lesotho: 32.4
  • Zambia: 32.0
  • Ethiopia: 25.1
  • Mali: 24.5
  • Burkina Faso: 21.7

What separates Lesotho from its peers?

Lesotho scores 32.4 on Learning, below the median of the 10 scored peers, which is 33.7.

Indicators placed above the peer median on the scale: human Capital Index and firms offering formal training.

Indicators placed below the peer median on the scale: research citation impact.

Lesotho has more than the peer median of tertiary enrolment and public education expenditure.

Lesotho has less than the peer median of vocational share of secondary.

Each sentence compares one position with one median. Why a difference exists, and what to do about it, lie outside this data.

What this reading does not show

  • A national score is a coarse proxy. A capability forms in firms, cities, networks and groups below the level of the country, and a national average only describes the conditions they work in.
  • Peers share income and nothing else. Size, production structure, region and political regime are outside the rule, and a set of 10 countries can change with any revision to GDP.
  • An r reads the whole set at once and says nothing about one country alone. A correlation does not show a cause either.
  • The known artefacts that bear on Learning, described on the limits page: artefact A7.
  • And the ones every score in the benchmark carries: artefact A8, artefact A10.