There are 75 manufacturing firms in the dataset. 47% the sample was in the garments sector (including footwear and leather) and 25% were in food and beverages (including meat and poultry). This fairly closely matches the overall distribution of manufacturing firms in the country. The remaining firms were in variety of other manufacturing sub-sectors including construction materials (11%), printing (8%) and other (9%) .
The following firm sizes were included in the sample: Micro (1-9 workers) - 15%; Small (10-49) - 32%; Medium (50-99) - 3%; Large (100-499) - 25%; Very Large (Over 500) - 25%.
To ensure adequate coverage of large and very large firms and to reflect their importance to the economy in terms of employment, these enterprises are overrepresented in the ICS sample. The sample was divided between small and micro firms and large and very large firms, there were very few medium sized firms (between 50 and 100 employees) in the sample. In part, this reflects a divide between garments producers and other firms, the median garment producer in the
ICS sample had 550 employees, while the median non-garment producer had 25 employees.
The private sector mapping showed that most of the private sector firms in Lesotho are located in Maseru district, which contains almost 60 percent of companies, followed distantly by Leribe (which includes the important industrial centre of Maputsoe) with 12 percent. Two other districts, Berea and Mafeteng have 6 percent each. The survey sample, which only includes manufacturing firms, matches this distribution relatively closely. About 53 percent of firms in the ICS sample are in Maseru, 14 percent are in Leribe and 14 percent are in Berea. No other regions accounts for over 10 percent of the sample.
In summary, the sample reflects the private sector relatively well in terms of the sectoral and locational distribution of firms in Lesotho. Large and very large firms are oversampled in ICS, reflecting their importance to the economy.
