Rural Employment in Africa: Trends and Challenges

Luc Christiaensen and Miet Maertens ()
Additional contact information
Miet Maertens: Division of Bioeconomics, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Annual Review of Resource Economics, 2022, vol. 14, issue 1, 267-289

Abstract: Africa's rural population continues to expand rapidly, and labor productivity in agriculture and many rural-off farm activities remains low. This review uses the lens of a dual economy and the associated patterns of agricultural, rural, and structural transformation to review the evolution of Africa's rural employment and its inclusiveness. Many African countries still find themselves in an early stage of the agricultural and rural transformation. Given smaller sectoral productivity gaps than commonly assumed, greater size effects, and larger spillovers, investment in agriculture and the rural off-farm economy remains warranted to broker the transition to more and more productive rural employment. The key policy questions thus become how best to invest in the agri-food system (on and increasingly also off the farm) and how best to generate demand for nonagricultural goods and services that rural households can competitively produce. Informing these choices continues to present a major research agenda, with digital technologies, the imperative of greening, and intra-African liberalization raising many unarticulated and undocumented opportunities and challenges.

Keywords: decent work; dual economy; gender; productive employment; rural migration; youth employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J21 J43 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-resource-111820-014312
Full text downloads are only available to subscribers. Visit the abstract page for more information.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anr:reseco:v:14:y:2022:p:267-289

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.annualreviews.org/action/ecommerce

DOI: 10.1146/annurev-resource-111820-014312

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Annual Review of Resource Economics from Annual Reviews Annual Reviews 4139 El Camino Way Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by http://www.annualreviews.org ().