When Maleshoane Rakojoana was furloughed from her job at a Lesotho clothing factory nearly three months ago, it turned her whole family’s life upside down. No longer able to afford the rent, they had to leave the capital, Maseru, and move in with relatives, miles away from where her children go to school. Because Rakojoana is the main breadwinner for her extended family, her loss of income has created a wave of impoverishment that ripples through the generations.
“I’m the main provider in the family. I support my mother, my sister, and her kids as well as mine. I pay rent, buy groceries, school supplies for the kids,” she said. “I spent a week looking for another job, but because there are so many people looking at the moment, I didn’t get one. There aren’t any other options—we just have to take what work we can get.”
It is a story repeated thousands of times over in Lesotho, a small, landlocked state in southern Africa that has become caught up in U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff wars. The country that Trump famously said no one’s ever heard of has certainly heard of him: Before any tariff increases had even come into effect, Lesotho had declared a national state of disaster as it faced up to the twin crises of massive U.S. aid cuts and what the think tank ODI Global has described as a “gendered supply chain shock” in the garment industry.
At the end of June, Rakojoana’s employer, which manufactures tops and leggings for Walmart and JCPenney, suspended all 900 employees—the vast majority of them women—as orders fell off a cliff in the face of threatened U.S. tariffs of 50 percent. The company put her on a monthly stipend of 800 loti (about $50), around a third of what she made when she was working.
The Lesotho government has since been able to negotiate a much-reduced tariff of 15 percent, but with orders already lost, much damage had been done.
The impact on Lesotho’s garment sector has been significant because its exports are heavily skewed to the United States. It’s among the biggest beneficiaries of the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act, which gives eligible countries in sub-Saharan Africa preferential access to the U.S. market—a trade deal that significantly improved Lesotho’s economic fortunes. But that’s due to expire on Sept. 30, and Washington has given no indication that it will be renewed.
The garment industry is the country’s biggest private employer, and entire factories have stopped operations, with no indication of when or whether they will reopen. In all, around 9,000 women in Lesotho have been either laid off or moved to half-time work, according to the National Clothing Textile and Allied Workers Union, which represents garment workers.
Lesotho has been hit particularly hard. But across Africa and Asia, women whose lives were changed by the earning power that garment manufacturing offered are being affected by Trump’s tariff drive. The impact goes well beyond them as individuals—many support extended families as well as their own children.
“These women are often the main breadwinners, and if they lose their jobs, it’s going to mean children being pulled out of school,” said Prachi Agarwal, a research fellow with the think tank ODI Global. “It can lead to higher incidence of food insecurity, or lack of access to the proper number of meals per day and lower access to health care.”
We spoke to women in Lesotho, Bangladesh, and Cambodia to illustrate the scale of the crisis, which is still playing out as governments scramble to negotiate deals and clothing retailers respond to the uncertainty by freezing or canceling orders.
Asma Begum worked at the same factory in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka for 15 years before she was suddenly let go as orders dipped. She managed to find work at another factory two months ago, but despite her years of experience, she had to accept an entry-level salary of around $115 each month before overtime—less than the up to $240 (with overtime) that she was making before.
Begum, who’s 36, said that it’s common for factories to lay off older, more experienced workers because it’s cheaper to hire younger ones. She and her husband first moved to Dhaka from their home village in the north of the country to seek work because they needed to pay off loans that they took out to cover medical treatment when their young son fell sick. Initially, her husband earned money driving a rickshaw or as a day laborer on construction sites. But he has been unable to work for several years due to a spinal injury that has left him bedridden.
As the sole breadwinner, Begum is proud to have been able to keep her two children in secondary school. But the overtime that she used to depend on getting is now scarce, and she worries for the future.
“In Bangladesh, the garment industry employs a significant number of women, more than any other profession. So when garment factories shut down, it is these women who suffer the most,” she said.
“Many garment factories have closed, and their owners were either never around or have fled without paying wages. Workers from these factories are struggling to find jobs. They’re actively looking, but without new orders from buyers, companies are unwilling to hire.”
Bangladesh, which sends more than $7 billion worth of clothing to the United States every year, according to U.S. government data, was initially threatened with a 35 percent tariff, but managed to negotiate that down to 20 percent by promising to import more from the United States to even out a trade imbalance. As one of Europe’s key suppliers of apparel, it’s less dependent on the U.S. market than Lesotho, but many workers were already making less than a living wage even before the latest shock, according to a recent briefing paper by pressure group Swedwatch.
Over the past three decades, the garment industry has transformed the economic prospects of women in Bangladesh, which has one of the region’s highest rates of female workforce participation. The industry employs more than 4 million people, mostly women. But that transformation is fragile because it depends so heavily on one industry.
“If this job ends and I can’t find new work, we’ll have to go back to our village,” Begum said. “Most women from my area are in Dhaka, and about 95 percent of them work in the garment industry. There are no job opportunities for them at home.”
Women in Lesotho, Bangladesh, and Cambodia all said that there were no realistic employment alternatives available to them. That’s what most concerns development experts, especially in the context of global aid cuts.
If these jobs go, “workers will struggle to pay for basic necessities such as food, school fees, and health care,” said Rola Abimourched, who investigates gender equity at the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor rights organization.
Workers in Cambodia enjoy some protection because the garment workers’ union has negotiated a minimum monthly wage of $208. But Hong Seak, a single mother in her 40s with one son, said ever-increasing targets means that the work is becoming punishingly hard. Her wage from a garment factory supports her entire family, including her elderly father and two siblings.
“We have to produce more every day. I am a sewer, and if I manage to do 100 pieces today, my target tomorrow will be 105,” she said. “If I didn’t have debts to pay and family members depending on me, I’d quit.”
Union leaders said Washington’s threat in April to impose a 49 percent tariff on Cambodia had spooked garment buyers earlier this year, but orders were coming back after the country negotiated that down to 19 percent.
However, they also said that they were concerned about an influx of Cambodian workers who returned from Thailand last month after a deadly border clash, at a time when jobs at home are already scarce.
When individual countries have suffered trade shocks in the past, women workers have often crossed borders and found similar work in neighboring countries. But that’s harder to do when the trade shock is global. Regional economic giants India, China, and South Africa are all facing even higher U.S. tariffs than many of their smaller neighbors. And anti-migrant sentiment is on the rise. India, for example, has been forcibly returning migrants to Bangladesh for several years, and migrant workers in parts of South Africa have recently faced harassment when seeking medical treatment.
So what solutions might there be? Agarwal, at ODI Global, believes that there are lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, when factories around the world shut down and development banks stepped in to help.
“Because we’re talking about a very gendered impact, I think the affected countries can adopt a gendered response strategy to this, where they are getting programs and unemployment benefits to women who have lost their jobs. And this essentially means tying it up with development banks who can be of assistance,” she says. “The mere reaction of countries, the panic it has created, tells you that it [the impact] is going to be big.”
“The U.S. administration is making all these decisions sitting in their offices and not realizing there are thousands of lives at risk,” Agarwal added.
Additional reporting was contributed by Sharif Khiam Ahmed in Dhaka and Sineat Yon.
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