africa

Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
by the rise in employment in services. Very little increase has been taking place in
the manufacturing and industrial sector, which contributes only 8.5 percent of the
region’s employment. This is a key observation given that wage employment and
its growth is an important indicator of economic development. Evidence shows that
wage employment as a share of total employment increases rapidly as a country
progresses on its development path and, conversely, that the share of agriculture in
wage employment peaks at low levels of per capita national income and is almost
zero in developed countries (Bhorat, 2013a).
Table 9.3: Employment Shares by Sector and Sex, World, and Regions,
2000-10 (%)
Source: ILO (2012).
Notes: 2011 figures are preliminary estimates.
Since labor in SSA primarily works in activities related to the land in rural areas or
in some form of retail-related service, creating more such jobs will not be sufficient
to move these individuals and households out of poverty. Improvements are also
needed in the quality of jobs. SSA has had a consistently high rate of vulnerable
employment over the last decade, ranging between 77 percent and 81 percent and
marginally second only to that in South Asia (ILO, 2012).
Africa’s numbers of working poor are also very large: workers earning less than
$2 a day—currently 193 million people—constitute almost two-thirds of the total
employed and are approximately eight times as numerous as the unemployed in
the region (Table 9.4).
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