How to create sustainable employment for impoverished, mostly illiterate African populations residing primarily in rural areas is the challenge the African Union aims to tackle at a summit opening Wednesday in Burkina Faso, reports the the World Bank press review Tuesday.
Few countries on the worlds poorest continent are able to boast of a formal employment rate above 25 percent that engages a young labor force in industry, commerce or trade.
Instead, most are wedded to subsistence agriculture, which is not conducted on a large enough scale to feed the entire country, let alone produce a surplus that can be sold in international markets – even without the extra burden of competing with heavily subsidized agricultural products from developed countries.
More than 320 million people across the 34 countries in sub-Saharan Africa live in extreme poverty – surviving on less than a dollar a day without consistent access to clean water, sanitation or health care.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the only place in the world where things are worse now than 20 years ago, according to the UN Development Program, and is likely the only region to be unable to reach UN millennium development goals that would halve poverty by 2015.
Poverty has outpaced population growth across the continent for the last decade, expanding at 3,3 percent per year compared to 3,1 percent annual growth for the continent as a whole, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
Economic growth has progressed slightly from 3,2 percent in 2002 to 4,2 percent in 2003, on the strength of an increase in oil exports from powerhouse Nigeria to higher output from South Africa, the continents largest economy.
Even South Africa faces a jobs crisis, according to a recent central bank report that put the unemployment rate at 28 percent, or 42 percent when the number of people who have stopped actively looking for work was factored in.
That disconnect means that any economic prosperity will be absorbed by a tiny sector of the population, International Labor Organization head Juan Somavia warned. – Growth without employment means aggravating inequality; instead of spreading wealth, it concentrates it, he said adding: -Job creation cannot be left to flow as a result of other economic policies; it must be a targeted objective.
The summit also aims to address the thorny question of economic migration by tens of thousands of Africans risking life and limb to make it to Europe in search of a better life, said Alain Ludovic Thou, Burkina Fasos minister of labor. Making paid work more accessible to women – who represent more than half of the population but less than one-third of those who are gainfully employed – is also a key priority.
Meanwhile the 400 delegates holding the first forum of social partners to prepare the African Union summit called on African governments to place emphasis on sectors with high potential growth in terms of job creation.
These include the agriculture sector, education, human resource development, culture, tourism and other priority sectors of NEPAD (the New Partnership for Africas Development).
They called on multinationals to exempt African nations from the payment of license fees for generic drugs. They also appealed to Africas financial partners to ensure greater consistency between their policies and interventions, and give priority to the creation of businesses and jobs in various poverty reduction programs and strategies.
The forum finally called for the cancellation of the African public debt in order to release additional resources for socio- economic development, access for the continents products to markets of developed countries, and the elimination of agricultural subsidies.
African policy-makers must make employment a top priority in order to counter the adverse impact of globalization, Somavia stated on the eve of a two-day African Union summit on poverty alleviation. – Job creation cannot be left to flow as a result of other economic policies, it must be a targeted objective, he said.
In a recent statement, the ILO denounced the “perverse effects of structural adjustment programs advocated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.” Both organizations have been invited to send representatives to the Ouagadougou conference.
– The international economic system is obviously unfair to Africa, which is marginalized by globalization. It is clear that globalization is not meeting the need to create jobs, Somavia said.
Somavia said major building projects and other infrastructure had “an enormous potential to create jobs,” but noted that the tendering which precedes them “benefits multinational companies first and foremost and does not do enough for the local workforce.”
Field studies carried out by the ILO show that “you can create three times as many jobs using local manpower while respecting the same technical specifications and deadlines, while keeping costs the same, if not lower,” he added.
Somavia made a plea for micro-credit, saying it could help provide the legal and financial means to develop informal sectors, which were “hugely creative but have very low productivity.”
Micro-credits allow the poor, notably women, to obtain small loans that traditional banks are reluctant to accord them, and help them engage in productive economic activity.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
