Dear Lesotho,

You are a nation that already exports its water and is paid for it. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project carries about 780 million cubic metres a year from your mountains to South Africa, and you earn about $220 million a year in royalties, as reported in March 2026. Almost all of the electricity you generate comes from renewable sources. Few nations own an asset so clean, so steady and so plainly valued.

The World Bank is financing a second phase of lowland water supply, renewable energy and access, smallholder farming, nutrition and health, education, transport and trade, and a programme for sustainable livelihoods. These are the right guarantees. The royalty is larger than most of them combined.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. At the last count, in 2016, ninety-seven in every hundred of your children reached the end of primary school unable to read a simple text. Only thirty-one in every hundred of you drink safely managed water at home. Sixty-two in every hundred of you cannot always count on enough good food. Reading sets your Coverage today, at 3.1 out of 100, with water and food close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

In 2026 you asked for a new deal on the price of your water. Whatever price you agree, the stronger question is where the royalty goes. A water royalty is a revenue stream that can be pledged, year by year, to outcomes a citizen can feel: a clinic staffed, a home connected, a farm irrigated.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Lesotho: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no Mosotho falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“Your mountains already sell water to a continent. Let the royalty buy food, water and care at home.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect Lesotho ReDesign Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect Lesotho will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.