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This paper focuses on a land reform in Lesotho, southern Africa, to explore theoretical concepts around development, land access, and measurement. The reform, which moved land allocation rights from traditional authorities to market exchange, was sponsored by the U.S. government's Millennium Challenge Corporation [MCC]. The MCC, a U.S. government agency separate from USAID and the State Department, is an international development agency dedicated to "poverty reduction through economic growth." The MCC has demonstrated that it acknowledges "the critical role that land, natural resources and other property assets play in economic development" (MCC.gov), with at least 15 of its funded projects devoting money to land rights. This is substantial, accounting for a third of MCC's 45 partner countries. Among MCC's main foci is "data-driven" development. The MCC contributed $20 million to Lesotho's land reform. That funding was contingent on the passage and execution of Land Act 2010 by Lesotho's Parliament. That law was part of a number of other pieces of legislation that sought to "modernize" (MCC Compact) Lesotho's land tenure system. The land tenure system that existed prior to these laws allowed chiefs substantial power in determining the allocation of land. The MCC and Government of Lesotho (GoL) prioritized passage of these laws, in part to remove a significant remaining power of the chieftaincy. This reflects a longstanding tension between institutions of the state in Lesotho and the chiefs. Of a similar effort at land reform in 1973, R.C. Leduka said "it brings into sharp relief the historically entrenched political and institutional tensions between customary and Lesotho's colonial and postcolonial states" (Leduka 2007, 104-5). Women were a targeted demographic of this development intervention. Women's status in Lesotho is complex and changing. On one hand, a majority of primary school students in the country are girls, and the World Economic Forum regularly ranks Lesotho highly on its Global Gender Gap report. On the other, married women were legally considered minors until 2006. The shape of labor and geography is also changing in Lesotho. Before 2000, a massive number of working-age men traveled to South Africa to work in that country's mining sector. Since the end of Apartheid rule in South Africa, that country's labor market has shrunk significantly to

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