Thumbnail Image

Africa’s Evolving Employment Structure: Causes and Consequences

Year of publication 2016

Pages 39 p.

Author Yeboah, K. F.;Jayne, T.S.

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Meeting

Edition 1

Synopsis (short abstract) We document the evolving trends in sectoral composition of Africa’s workforce, with particular attention to youth and rural/urban areas using nationally representative data from nine countries. Trends are similar when examining employment in terms of counts of jobs vs. full-time equivalents, but the share of the workforce in non-farm employment is considerably higher using the latter measure. Employment trends observed for the youth are also remarkably similar to that of the total working-age po pulation, regardless of whether we define youth as between 15-24 or 15-35 years of age. While acknowledging variability across countries, we generally observe a sharp exit of labor from farming to off-farm activities in the last decade indicative of the economic transformation underway in the region. The pace of labor exit from farming is more pronounced in countries that experienced relatively strong agricultural productivity growth. There is a corresponding rapid percentage growth in employmen t shares in the off-farm sectors both within the agri-food system and the non-farm sector. However, the off-farm segment of the agri-food system is particularly growing from an initial low base and hence will not generate as many new jobs as farming and the non-farm sector. Despite its declining employment share, farming remains the single largest employer and extremely important for livelihoods and economic growth due to its strong linkages with other sectors. Strategies that effectively raise the returns to labor in farming will be thus be crucial to building broad-based and inclusive economic growth and fostering successful economic transformation.

Meeting Session Number 19-20 September 2016

Language English

Also available in:
No results found.

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Thumbnail Image
    Book (series)
    Decent rural employment in different farming systems in Sub-Saharan Africa 2016
    Also available in:
    No results found.
    This paper analyses how the relationship between decent rural employment and agricultural productivity vary across production systems. The focus is on sub-Saharan Africa, taking Ethiopia and Tanzania as case studies. A latent class stochastic frontier approach is applied to identify different production systems and technologies for a sample of farms in the two countries. Subsequently, we estimate the efficiency of production for these systems and investigate in how far decent rural employment indicators explain different levels of efficiencies across different latent classes.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet
    Youth Employment in Mali 2017
    Also available in:
    In Mali, 40 percent of the population is aged between 15 and 40 and youth unemployment rates are extremely high in the rural areas which represents a clear threat to social cohesion and food security within the communities. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is working with the Ministry of Agriculture to implement Youth at Work: Reducing Rural Poverty (2014-2016), a programme which aims at generating attractive and decent job opportunities for rural youth with a sp ecific attention to girls and young women, a key contribution to strengthening resilience for food security and nutrition and reducing rural poverty in Mali.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet
    Youth employment in agriculture as a solid solution to ending hunger and poverty in Africa
    FSN Forum activity report No. 153
    2018
    Also available in:
    This document summarizes the online discussion Youth employment in agriculture as a solid solution to ending hunger and poverty in Africa, which was held on the FAO Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum) from 16 July to 10 August 2018. The discussion was organized to gather views in advance of the 20-21 August regional conference “Youth Employment in Agriculture as a Solid Solution to Ending Hunger and Poverty in Africa: Engaging through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and Entrepreneurship” in Kigali, Rwanda. The major thematic areas of the conference focused on youth and entrepreneurship, digital innovation, and the future of work in the rural economy. The FSN Forum online discussion provided an opportunity for young people engaged in agriculture and rural development across Africa to share related experiences, successes stories, lessons learned, and good practices, and to raise issues/questions that could be addressed at the Kigali conference.
Show more

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

No results found.