Economic Growth and Development

It is widely agreed that reducing poverty in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA) depends largely on stimulating growth in agriculture. To this end, heads of state in Africa rallied to form the pan-African Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) with the goal of raising investments and improving strategy implementation. However, while implementing an agricultural agenda under the CAADP framework, more and more countries have realized that increasing public investment in agriculture alone is not enough.

The World Development Report 2013: Jobs stresses the role of strong private sector led growth in creating jobs and outlines how jobs that do the most for development can spur a virtuous cycle. The report finds that poverty falls as people work their way out of hardship and as jobs empower women to invest more in their children. Efficiency increases as workers get better at what they do, as more productive jobs appear, and as less productive ones disappear. Societies flourish as jobs foster diversity and provide alternatives to conflict.

This paper examines how tertiary-level agricultural education in sub-Saharan Africa can contribute to agricultural development beyond its current role as a source of technical training. The paper draws on data and information gathered from semistructured key informant interviews conducted in late 2006 in and around Addis Ababa, Ambo, Haramaya, Harar, Holetta, and Combolcha, as well as information and analysis from secondary sources.

The recent expansion of Chinese economic engagement in Africa is often poorly documented and not well understood. This paper is the second in an IFPRI-sponsored effort to better understand Chinese engagement in Africa’s agricultural sector. A clearer picture of Chinese activities in agriculture is important as a foundation for Africans and their development partners to more fruitfully engage with an increasingly important actor. Chinese engagement in agriculture and rural development in Tanzania is long-standing.

Econometric analysis of some 40 years of data has provided mixed results, because of the defects of the data, and because there are some relatively sudden structural economic shifts. An important shift is when agricultural labor ceases to grow, now happening in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). A model of the interrelationship over time of the rural, mainly agricultural sector, and the urban, mainly manufacturing and service sector, is proposed. Each provides a market to the other. Growth in both requires investment, but of distinctly different types.