Kigali, 29 May 2014 (ECA) - The Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Mr. Carlos Lopes has argued that a number of people employed in decent jobs on the continent is still a fraction of what Africa’s labor force requires, pointing out that two out of three workers are still involved in precarious types of employment.
Lopes said that although the continent's economies are already creating many job, they are not doing so at the speed and in the quantity needed.
He made these statements while intervening in a panel during the annual Meetings of the African Development Bank (AfDB) in Kigali on the topic: “Where are the jobs?”
“In order to have decent jobs on the continent, a number of the things have to happen, starting with policy coherence, strong leadership, the creation of a conducive environment for industrialization, the transformation of agriculture into high productivity agribusiness, and the transition of much of the service sector from precarious informality to the formal sector ”, said Lopes.
In many African countries, the informal economy is the largest provider of jobs for youth. For instance, in the Democratic Republic of Congo 96.2 percent of young workers claimed to be informally employed; in Cameroon the percentage is 88.6 and in Zambia, it is said that no less than 99 percent of working teenagers are employed in the informal economy.
Lopes said that Africa has to go beyond producing raw materials and build dynamic and competitive manufacturing sectors capable of processing the continent's abundant minerals and agricultural products. “Through industrialization we could transform the continent. We would enter global value chains with much more value, and won’t export our jobs abroad anymore,” he explains.
Africa has the skills needed for the type of manufacturing jobs required. “Already 32 percent of Africans have a secondary degree education”, said Lopes. The ECA Executive Secretary also made a strong case for African agriculture, saying that this sector needs to achieve a quite significant shift.
“We need to move into agribusiness, and make sure that our markets are more integrated. If you produce bananas in one country, it can be exported to the neighbor, without having all these very difficult tariff and non-tariff barriers that we see on our borders,” said Lopes.
Right now Africa has lowest Agricultural productivity in the world. In average, it has an average agricultural productivity of about 1.5 tons per hectare. “This is very low and it has not changed much for the last 20 years”, Lopes said.
Lopes believes that there is an enormous stock of untapped assets on the continent and if the financial resources lost due to the mispricing of Africa’s natural resources are added, there is as much as one trillion dollars in capital that could be mobilized for Africa’s development.
Lopes concluded that Africa has all the necessary ingredients for its transformation and should not miss this opportunity. “Commodity prices have gone up, exports from Africa are also going up due to more demand from emerging economies, the middle class is growing, better urbanized cities, services are expanding, the continent has the young and growing population and better economic governance, in terms of interconnectivity, Africa has more cellphones than India or Europe or the US. All these are positive trends that could boost Africa’s transformation."
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