Sub-Saharan Africa’s economies are growing
at more than twice the pace of economies of any other region, except China. But
Africa’s growth has produced less than a trickle of good fortune for hundreds
of millions of Africans who cannot find work.
One in four Africans are hungry. Recent
estimates show that the number of people living in extreme poverty in
Sub-Saharan Africa has increased. Despite high GDP growth, hundreds of millions
of Africans are hungry and malnourished. Between 2010 and 2012, the number of
hungry Africans grew from 175 million to 239 million, with nearly 20 million
added in the last few years.
In Kenya, it is estimated that less than 7
percent of the nearly 800,000 young people entering the job market annually can
find decent wage paying jobs. Moreover, less than 15 percent of Kenya’s 14.3
million people in some form of employment are engaged in the modern, formal
sector of the economy, i.e., agribusiness, services and industry.
In 2014, Kenya’s policymakers should make equitable
economic growth and creation of high quality jobs for a major priority. To be
successful, economic growth strategies and employment opportunities must be
designed and calibrated to respond to Kenya’s unique circumstances; a youthful
and a predominantly rural population.
Creating opportunity for the youth must
begin with how we educate our children. Education in this country is a
protracted process of university entrance. This is wrong. Our school system
designates as failures too many creative and talented kids who do not enter
university. But the irony is that college degrees are not worth much,
especially in this economy. A majority of fresh graduates are “hustlers”.
Moreover, potential employers think most of our college graduates are not work
ready.
We must re-think our education system and
invest in high quality early childhood education, a primary school system that
encourages and nurtures the creative instincts of children. We must discard the
current system, which privileges memorization and regurgitation. Our secondary
school system must lay the foundation for learning to learn. Vocational and
tertiary education must produce problem solvers who are capable of complex
reasoning, life long learners and creative innovators.
About 70 percent of Kenya’s population lives
in rural areas. A majority of this population is self-employed smallholders
engaged in subsistence crop production, fishing or pastoralism. Decades of underinvestment in research, extension, rural
infrastructure, financial services, and weather information have led to
inexorable decline in productivity and left a majority of Kenya’s rural
population outside the mainstream economy. Consequently, agriculture’s share of GDP has declined
from 88 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 2012.
The minders of our economy are under the illusion that investing
in legacy mega projects like massive irrigation, highways and railway lines
alone will deliver sustainable and shared economic growth. Among policy makers
in this government, just like the previous three the role of smallholder agriculture
is nebulous and often misunderstood.
Agriculture is more than just crops and food. A one-dollar
increase in exports of green coffee from Costa Rica generates an increase of
USD1.18 in family income. In comparison, each dollar transferred to Costa Rican
households produced only USD 0.99 of value added. Agriculture has considerable
multiplier effect in the wider economy. A multiplier is a measure of the
relationship between an initial increase in spending in one sector of the
economy and the total increase in spending in all sectors of the economy, owing
to the initial increase.
Recent studies cited by UNEP and International Fund for
Agricultural Development (IFAD) show that a 1 percent increase in agricultural
per-capita GDP has five times the impact on the poverty gap than the same increase
in GDP in other sectors. Other studies have shown that for every 10 percent
increase in farm yields, there was 7 percent reduction in poverty in Africa.
Studies have shown that agriculture promotes the inclusion
of rural communities, especially the poorest. Agriculture has been identified
as an important supplier of inputs and a generator of value added that plays a
key role in the distribution of the income between urban and rural regions.
Youth unemployment and grinding rural poverty are the
defining challenges of our time. Investing in the youth and rural farmers offers
the best pathway to achieving inclusive and socially sustainable economic
growth. Investing in our youth and rural development is smart economics. It is
also a moral imperative.
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