Rural Employment in Africa : Trends and Challenges
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 tr...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper (Numbered Series) |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Washington, DC: World Bank
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/423521645602857176/Rural-Employment-in-Africa-Trends-and-Challenges http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37023 |
| Summary: | 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. |
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