Africa’s employment perspectives towards 2040

Event Type
Conference

Location / Date
Bonn, 17.02.2020 until 18.02.2020

German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET), the Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings Institution, the Center for Development Research at University of Bonn (ZEF), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa as well as the international research and think tank networks GRECEST, Malabo-Montpellier Panel, PEGNet and T20 /Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is the only world region where the number of poor people is still rising. The vast majority of the workforce is employed informally, often under precarious conditions. While many Asian countries have shown that such conditions can be overcome, it is unclear what could drive such structural transformation in SSA.

At the same time, international conditions for economic development are undergoing radical change. Some changes open up new opportunities, whereas others may lead to SSA falling even further behind. Potential game changers include cost-reducing digital technologies; Africa’s rapid urbanization and rising middle classes; increasing global demand for high-value agricultural products; decarbonization and the replacement of fossil resources with biomaterials; asset stranding in the oil & gas industries; new opportunities stemming from low-cost renewable energy supply in rural areas; China becoming a high-income country that sheds labor-intensive light industries; trade wars among the main economic blocs and increased trade integration within Africa, to name just a few.

At the conference, we took such international trends as a starting point, exploring their likely impacts on structural transformation and employment in SSA, rather than extrapolating African trends from the past. This allowed us to (1) identify new development opportunities and threats and (2) address broader issues, such as assessing the future importance of industrialization, the development contributions of urbanization or the relative importance of exports vs. domestic sources for Africa’s development.

The conference was a joint endeavor of DIE with the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET), the Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings Institution, the Center for Development Research at University of Bonn (ZEF), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa as well as the international research and think tank networks GRECEST, Malabo-Montpellier Panel, PEGNet and T20 Africa.

Hinweis

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