Dakar, January 14 (APS) – The Secretary of State for Cooperatives and Peasant Management, Alpha Ba, magnified, Tuesday, in Dakar, the importance of “convincing data” in the development of public policies and job creation, particularly in the agricultural sector.
“We all know that one of the weaknesses of public policies in Africa is that they have not often been informed by evidence. We don’t take the scale and significance of all the data to inform the public policies we build,” he said.
He launched the work of an international seminar on the future of work and employment in the agricultural sector in West Africa.
This meeting is jointly initiated by the Office of Macroeconomic Analysis of the Senegalese Institute of Agricultural Research (Isra-Bame), the Center for International Cooperation in Agricultural Research for Development (CIRAD) and the National Research Institute agronomic (INRAE).
According to Alpha Ba, the primary sector, particularly agriculture, offers “enormous opportunities”, and it is enough to train young people to make it a source of employment in order to compensate for the lack of opportunities in this area.
“We are in a context in which if there is one challenge to be met mainly, it is the challenge of youth employment. It is an enormous challenge in the face of limited resources, in the face of limited opportunities,” underlined the Secretary of State.
Addressing the links between agriculture and processing, economist Ahmadou Aly Mbaye deplored the precariousness of agricultural jobs and the weakness of African industries.
“When you add up the unemployment rate and the rate of vulnerable jobs in our countries, you are at 80%,” indicated the former rector of the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, according to whom “virtually all agricultural jobs are precarious jobs.
-Ahmadou Aly Mbaye, citing data from the National Agency for Statistics and Demography (ANSD), reported that there are approximately 470,000 workers affiliated to the Pension Insurance Institution of Senegal (IPRES), compared to around 150,000 civil servants, out of a working age population of 9 million.
In Africa, “agriculture is losing productive resources, agricultural jobs are being lost year after year, and the manufacturing sector is struggling to take over,” he observed.
Scheduled for two days, this international seminar aims to open a space for reflection and scientific collaboration between different institutions, but also different actors, explained Astou Diao Camara.
“We believe that from today, the community that thinks about employment will expand further to include other scientists and that from here also, we will be able to further reshape the questions and issues which will make it possible to properly characterize these questions of employment and work,” added the director of Isra-Bame.
MYK/BK/ASG
