Promoting decent rural employment, by creating new jobs in rural areas and upgrading the existing ones, could be one of the most efficient pathways to reduce rural poverty. This article systematically investigates the impact of decent rural employment on agricultural production efficiency in Ethiopia and Tanzania. The analysis applies an output-oriented distance function approach with an estimation procedure that accounts for different technological, demographic, socioeconomic, institutional, and decent rural employment indicators. Data of the 2011 round of Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture for the two countries are used, and a set of indicators is derived to proxy core dimensions of decent rural employment. The findings of our analysis show that decent rural employment contributes to agricultural production efficiency.JEL classifications: D13, D24, J08, J24, J28
This chapter uses multiple data sources to illustrate the transitions made by youth over time either to the rural non-farm economy or to urban areas. Descriptives are given to the motivations and constraints youth face when engaging in the RNFE or in migrant labour. The findings suggest that there are limited rural employment opportunities for youth, leading to a slow pace of rural poverty reduction. Rural youth still work mainly in poor quality jobs in agriculture, although they increasingly try: (i) to diversify their and their family’s income by engaging in nonfarm employment, or (ii) to look for options outside rural areas by migration to urban areas or abroad. We review the main policies and programmes implemented in Senegal to examine potential for reform towards pro-transformative youth employment.
A qualitative analytical framework, policy discourse analysis, is applied to understand the prevalence of youth-targeting in national policies related to employment. Forty-seven policies from 13 Sub-Saharan African countries promulgated in 1996 to 2016 were selected for the evaluation, based on their direct or indirect relevance to youth employment via themes of development, rural transformation, and agriculture. The main findings show that policies focus more on promoting labour supply strategies, e.g. training programmes on entrepreneurship skills, rather than demand-side ones—such as reducing the constraints to business development and job creation at the sectoral level. Policies rarely touch on known constraints faced by youth, like their limited engagement in agribusiness activities and representation in policy dialogues. SSA policies with a youth employment lens associated to the different pillars of the Decent Work Agenda are assessed.
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