About GEN in Lesotho

GEN began engaging with Lesotho’s entrepreneurial community through its annual Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) campaign. Early momentum in the country of roughly two million people came with strong backing from the U.S. Embassy in Maseru, which supported youth pitch competitions and business expos designed to nurture local enterprise and open cross-border trade and investment. As awareness spread, GEN partnered with Makhotso Ketsi in 2017 to map the ecosystem and build a homegrown startup culture, including developing resources for aspiring Lesotho founders. In 2022, GEN named John Matlosa its lead for Lesotho to further its work on a year-round basis.

As the GEW campaign matured from a series of standalone events into a national rallying point for entrepreneurship, Lesotho’s national institutions became central pillars of the movement. The government-backed Basotho Enterprise Development Corporation (BEDCO) incorporated GEW into its annual agenda to help young innovators overcome structural and financial barriers. Organizations such as the Entrepreneurs Network Lesotho and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) extended the campaign into markets, digital spaces, and village-level communities so that even the smallest self-starters could find mentorship. Recent editions have grown around inclusive themes such as “Together We Build: Empowering Entrepreneurs for Inclusive Growth” in 2025. That campaign coincided with the launch of a national Lesotho Entrepreneurship Hub and Seed Financing Facility “Demo Day,” which brought institutional investors, international partners, and citizens together to back high-growth startups.

GEN’s work in Lesotho has carried weight in policy circles. For example, it contributed to the government’s review of the country’s national innovation and copyright legislation by recommending reforms intended to remove regulatory friction for entrepreneurs. It also provided input on the development of Lesotho’s Second National Strategic Development Plan (NSDP II) and worked to strengthen enterprise support organizations and small-business incubation in support of the World Bank’s Lesotho Competitiveness and Financial Inclusion (CAFI) Project. Through Global Enterprise Registration (GER) — GEN’s long term joint initiative with United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) — it helped the government simplify and digitalize its business registration process. In 2024, the GEN team joined UNCTAD colleagues in Geneva for a series of implementation workshops; the new digital platform went live in 2025.

GEN connects Lesotho’s founders to its global programs including Startup Huddle, GEN’s long-running program of monthly meetups where founders pitch works-in-progress and receive peer and mentor feedback. The chapter in Maseru, organized by Moseme Sello, hosted its first event in 2023, joining a worldwide network of more than 60 Startup Huddle chapters. Through the Entrepreneurship World Cup (EWC) — a global pitch competition GEN launched in 2019, offering free training, mentorship, and a share of $1 million in annual prizes — GEN has encouraged Lesotho startups at the growth, early, and idea stages to compete on the global stage. In 2022, the Vodacom Lesotho Foundation partnered with GEN to expand the national competition and host a finals event in Maseru. The EWC aligned with the foundation’s goals of curbing unemployment and channeling support to founders who struggle to access traditional bank financing.

GEN programming and competitions have created a point of entry for Lesotho’s founders to join the GEN Starters Club, a global community of promising founders, such as Miloane Mokhobo, founder and CEO of Wild Plants Growers, and Libuseng Visser of Pasa Productions (Pty) Ltd., with access to training, mentorship, and an international network.

Lesotho’s growing role in the GEN community earned international recognition at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) in Melbourne in 2023, where John Matlosa, our key GEN Global Leader for Lesotho, won GEN Rookie of the Year honors — a recognition of the rapid momentum he created. GEN’s work is supported by Ntšepeng Tšitsa of the BAM Group Foundation, a key organizing partner of GEN activities, and Relebohile Hlabana, an entrepreneurial coach and facilitator at the National University of Lesotho. GEN also maintains extensive relationships with a broad range of ecosystem partners including BEDCO, Business Doctors Lesotho, Entrepreneurs Network Lesotho, National University of Lesotho (NUL), Vodacom Lesotho Foundation and UNDP.

Together, they have positioned GEN at the center of Lesotho’s maturing ecosystem — one focused on closing the gap between the country’s strong technical talent and the business skills founders need to scale. GEN’s continuing mission in Lesotho is to remove structural barriers, deepen financial inclusion across the country’s estimated 76,000 small and medium enterprises, and connect local innovators directly to global markets, capital, and knowledge.