Africa’s Employment Challenge and the Role of Agriculture: Is China a Player? A Review of Chinese Initiatives in Rural Africa

Over the last years African economies have been praised for their robust growth rates which offer positive perspectives for economic development and private investment and suggest a process of catching-up with the rest of the world. However, the quality of this growth is a growing issue because it has a very limited impact on poverty and does not translate so far in a progressive structural transformation of African economies. Therefore, and due to a booming labor force, employment is becoming a burning issue where the question of the sectors of absorption of growing cohorts of youth challenges public policies. This employment challenge is recognized by the international community, as evidenced by the recent publication of numerous reference documents - such as the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) 2013 focusing on employment (World Bank 2012) - and many of them focus on the very specific situation of Africa, and more precisely Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), like the African Economic Outlook 2012 (AfdB et al. 2012) or the special report on African youth employment (Filmer & Fox 2014)1. The paper recapitulates first the specifics of African structural transformation, its consequences on the employment challenge and points the remaining and long lasting importance of the rural sector. It then puts in perspective the role of China and its impacts on the sector. Based on new evidence, it reviews Chinese interventions - investments and public aid – and stresses its limitations. The paper finally addresses the evolving role of Chinese cooperation in the rural sector and its uncertainties, between increasing implication in the policy dialogue or withdrawal towards a business-only perspective. The Dramatic Challenge of Employment in SSA SSA is very specific because its structural transformation has been lagging when compared to other regions of the world.2 It has experienced rapid changes characterized by a huge process of urbanization over the last fifty years and a rapid economic growth in the last decade; but it remains, with South Asia, the poorest region in the world.3 The "African lions" of McKinsey (2010) are lightened by 35% of their GDP when North Africa is subtracted; and SSA only represents 45% of the total wealth of the continent when South Africa (20% of the overall GDP) is withdrawn. It however gathers together 75% of its population.