The Full Story is a partnership between The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy.

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.”

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........

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