People & Human Capital/Force / 09
A generation arrives
every year.
The working-age population is growing faster than the jobs, and the gap is the whole story.
The state of it/01
The arithmetic
is relentless.
The working-age population of Sub-Saharan Africa stands at 745 million and grows by about 21.7 million people every year. The labour force is 527 million and adds roughly 15.2 million.
Measured unemployment is 5.7 percent, which sounds comfortable and is misleading. In an economy without unemployment benefit, almost nobody can afford to be unemployed. They are working, at very low productivity, mostly for themselves.
That is why 49.3 percent of employment is still in agriculture. It is the sector that absorbs people rather than the sector that pays them well.
The question is not whether these people will work. It is whether the work will be productive enough to raise a wage, and that depends on what the rest of the economy builds.
What decides it/02
What decides
whether it becomes a workforce.
Training built backwards from a real employer with real vacancies places people. Training built forwards from a curriculum produces qualified people in a market that does not want that qualification.
The difference is not the quality of the teaching. It is who specified the syllabus.
Primary health care, clean water and a functioning clinic determine how many days a year a person can work and how long a working life lasts.
This is normally argued as a moral case. It is also the cheapest productivity intervention available, and it compounds across a generation.
Most African migration is to another African country or to a city in the same one. Remittances then flow back and fund housing, schooling and small enterprise more reliably than most formal credit.
Policy that treats movement as a failure misreads what is a functioning, if painful, allocation of labour.
The small trader, the workshop, the transport operator: these employ most of the continent's non-farm workers. They are undercapitalised rather than unwilling.
A modest amount of working capital at a survivable rate would do more for employment than most large formal schemes, and it is the hardest thing on the continent to arrange.
What it means/03
This is
the asset.
While much of the world is running out of workers, Africa gains 21.7 million working-age people every year. No other continent has that. What gets built around them decides what it becomes.
The Brief/
The NextStep Africa
Brief.
What the engine turns up, every fortnight. From Lagos.
- What moved
- The change that mattered, and the number under it.
- How it connects
- The systems involved, and what one does to another.
- What it turns on
- What has to go right, and who is already building it.
- What to watch
- One indicator, and when it resolves.
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From the founder's desk.
NextStep Africa / Lagos