Rural Employment in Africa: Trends and Challenges

Luc Christiaensen and Miet Maertens

No 33740439, Jobs Group Papers, Notes, and Guides from The World Bank

Abstract: Africa’s rural population continues to expand rapidly and labor productivity in agriculture and many rural off farm activities remains low. This paper 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 which rural households can competitively produce. Informing these choices continues to present a major research agenda, with digitization, the imperative of greening and intra-African liberalization raising many unarticulated and undocumented opportunities and challenges.

Keywords: rural employment; Agriculture; rural transformation; labor productivity; rural area; international food policy research institute; productivity gap; productive employment; agricultural self-employment; account advance rate; corporate code of conduct; Drivers of Economic Growth; agricultural employment; food system; surplus labor; Agricultural Research and Development; research and development policy; rural labor market; employment in agriculture; informal sector employment; number of workers; rural labor force; agricultural labor; Agricultural Value Chain; off-farm employment; investments in agriculture; wage employment; high population density; gender wage gap; agricultural labor force; agricultural wage labor; Job Quality; rural youth; global value chain; employment condition; working condition; minimum wage; agricultural transformation; dual economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2022-02-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/42352164 ... rends-and-Challenges

Related works:
Journal Article: Rural Employment in Africa: Trends and Challenges (2022)
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:wbk:jbsgrp:33740439

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Jobs Group Papers, Notes, and Guides from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Selome Assefa Hailemariam ().