It’s widely accepted that Africa south of the Sahara faces a looming economic crisis due to its “youth bulge”—the rising share of working-age young people due to recent declines in mortality coupled with high fertility.
But such broad “stylized facts” often don’t hold up on close examination. At the recent launch event for the book, Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa: Beyond Stylized Facts, co-editors James Thurlow, an IFPRI Senior Research Fellow, and Valerie Mueller, an IFPRI Non-Resident Fellow, explored the social and economic implications of the youth bulge.
Spoiler alert: Mueller summed up the book’s findings by saying, “Africa doesn’t have a youth problem but rather faces the broader challenge of promoting inclusive growth!”
While he and Mueller started out agreeing with the view that Africa has a “youth problem,” Thurlow admitted, they discovered that many perceptions about rural youth were based in global and regional studies rather than country level realities. While the youth bulge presents challenges, he said, it is not unprecedented. The region is now economically outperforming others at the times they faced similar demographic trends, including Latin America and East and South Asia. The main difference is that “agriculture and the real non-farm economy are going to have to play a far more important role in solving Africa’s youth employment challenge than perhaps it did in other developing regions,” Thurlow said.
The good news is that African agriculture continues to grow rapidly, and African youth are better educated than their elders, he said, so in general the outlook for rural youth is hopeful and they can be crucial agents of change in transforming the continent’s agriculture sector.
Among the project’s key questions, Mueller said, is whether youth are more likely than older generations to drive the transition from subsistence to commercial farming, and to what extent they are moving to non-farm employment. The nonfarm employment picture varied by country, she explained, with access to markets, transportation, and electricity being key in Ethiopia and Ghana; and age a causal factor in Tanzania and Malawi as older people had more time to accumulate capital, work experience, and social and economic networksAcross the board, she noted that education was the strongest determinant of non-farm employment, though not enough on its own to ensure success.
“Policies also rarely identified rural youth as a target group, but instead focused on youth in general, often implicitly giving greater weight to the needs of urban youth,” Mueller explained. The book also explores whether the observed patterns were gendered, and the degree to which opportunities for rural non-farm work relied on proximity to an urban sector. As with the earlier questions, the findings on the rural non-farm sector vary by geography; for example, female-led enterprises in Tanzania were often less productive than they were in other countries, likely due to a relative lack of education. Similarly, with rural urban linkages, mixed effects were found based on country.
“Context matters, content specifically matters” in understanding these issues, said IFPRI Senior Research Fellow Rui Benfica. “This book definitely addresses a critical relevant issue in development today … contrasting prior knowledge that was mostly focused on stylized facts, this one basically combines this country, cross-country data with individual country data to be able to actually highlight the need to emphasize specificity in the youth issue of the transformation process.”
One issue the book does not address, and critical from a policy perspective, Benfica said, is developing an understanding of what needs to be done to improve education and non-cognitive skills. In the end, he said, improved youth productivity, physical and virtual connectivity, and youth agency are critical to promoting rural employment.
Tying together the various lessons in the book, Thurlow stressed the need for “a more nuanced understanding of what are the factors that determine the prospects, and the role of youth in rural Africa.” Mueller urged, “Africa needs better policies—not necessarily youth policies.”
Katarlah Taylor is an IFPRI Senior Events Specialist.
Full text copies of the book are available for download here.
