Jobs and skills in Africa - or 'Blundering about in the Dark!"

I have been doing some short-term research as part of support for a small NGO working in 6 SSA countries and helping them to develop their strategy for the next 3-5 years. They support local partners in delivering different combinations of training, tools, working space, shared resources and access to micro-finance. The objective is to enable women and men to develop small businesses and increase their income, in both rural and urban areas.

The objective was to answer some specific questions about the current and future sources and types of jobs, by sector and/or trade, potentially broken down by:

- new/growing eg IT, Energy, transport

- existing/changing eg construction, carpentry, electrical, plumbing, agriculture

- threatened eg tailoring

Ideally with a sense of the balance of urban vs rural jobs and employment, and the level and distribution of incomes. A further question concerned the rate at which people will have access to power as this will change the nature of the trades, skills and tools. This was not a rigorous academic study but was intended to allow the NGO to plan with its partners, the kinds of trades, skills and tools they should be focusing on in future. These will inevitably change with new ones emerging (eg renewable energy related) and others lessening or changing

The searches covered all the usual suspects (WB, IFC, ILO, ADB, DfID, IDS et al) as well as general searches. I have also emailed/talked to some of the organisations directly. The bulk of the useable, useful data has actually come from World Bank documents with additional papers from the IMF, ILO and ODI. However, the conclusion is that there is next to nothing of any real value out there. Not only that but many of the authors point this fact out in their papers! Much of it is very macro, being at very broad sector level at best. Papers from the macro-economists suggesting that follow the macro-economic policy and good things will happen. Alternatively, papers that rightly talk about the desperate need for jobs and /or the pay and conditions that those jobs need to provide - but have nothing to say about what jobs, where and how they might be generated. TVET (technical, vocational training) is seen to be very important but heavily criticised for the lack of evidence of its effectiveness, or the lack of joined up thinking in such programmes

Meanwhile, bidders for funds for projects in this area are expected to show how they will impact key indicators specified by, for example DfID, when livelihood/employment indicators let alone baselines are very thin on the ground.

This is going to take some years to address, to gradually build up a sufficiently robust (but not perfect) set of data that others can use. As readers of these blogs will know, for much of SSH, a large part of the population is in agriculture but engages in other activities to make up their incomes. If successful, they may in time move away from dependency on subsistence agriculture, and possibly become those micro or SME's who you might see linking into supply chains. Or conceivably improve their agricultural productivity to move out of a subsistence level. Arguably, with the right training and skills, the people might also be the resource from which SMEs can be built (noting the dependency of SMEs on access to skilled resources).

It feels to me that there is a massive need for sustained, 'bottom up' data collection and analysis to link into or align with the top down policies - many of which seem to hope or assert that 'good things will happen' without actually gathering data 'bottom up' to see whether it is happening. But no evidence that anyone is tackling this - though it does not stop donors asking for the data.

What have I missed? Or how do other people see the situation I wonder?

Robin Stafford