During 2004, CARE has been considering how to review its approach in some of its southern African country programmes. This debate has been carried out on a regional basis, and has been linked into some of CARE’s global thinking about its development approach. Lesotho, Malawi and Zambia have been particularly active in the southern African discussions, in the context of the regional food crisis that has demanded so much of the organisation’s attention in recent years. Plans were drawn up for the preparation of ‘position papers’ for Lesotho and Malawi that might serve as a basis for developing regional positions on key programmatic themes and policy issues. This work linked back into earlier analysis of livelihood trends in these countries, and a number of other studies that CARE was carrying out there. In Lesotho, these studies constituted the research component of the Livelihoods Recovery through Agriculture Programme (LRAP).

For Lesotho, the terms of reference for a ‘position paper’ have evolved into a more restricted task: the preparation of a short document that outlines the underlying causes of poverty in the country. This analysis draws extensively on the work done by LRAP: first, the overall analysis of livelihood trends (Turner, 2003), and then a number of the reports produced by the programme so far as part of its research strategy (Boehm, nd; Lethola, forthcoming; Magrath, 2004; Mothibi, 2003; Turner, forthcoming; Wason, 2004). It also draws on a number of other studies of poverty and livelihoods, notably the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (GOL, nd) and the report on the public consultations that preceded it (Leboela and Turner, 2003), as well as earlier CARE work on livelihoods in Lesotho (Turner et al., 2001).