Economic Essays on Rural Labor Markets, Agricultural Policy, and Poverty Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa

Reducing poverty remains a central development challenge in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, where livelihoods are being reshaped by population growth, land fragmentation, climate variability, and the gradual diversification of income beyond farming. This dissertation examines how rural labor markets and agricultural policy are associated with poverty and inequality in the region, with particular attention to the quality of jobs, access to remunerative employment opportunities, and the distribution of benefits across households. For the analysis, primary and secondary household-level data sets from various countries in Africa, each with several thousand observations, are combined with econometric modeling techniques. The dissertation comprises three empirical essays.
The first essay examines labor conditions across key rural sectors in Kenya, Namibia, Tanzania, and Zambia, using primary survey data from adults and employers. It shows that wage employment accounts for only a small share of rural livelihoods and that its quality is generally poor, with most workers earning below the minimum wage. Conditions vary sharply across sectors: public administration, education, and health offer better wages, more stable contracts, and more social protection than agriculture, construction, commerce, and hospitality.
The second essay analyzes how nonfarm employment relates to household poverty and income inequality in Tanzania, using five waves of nationally representative panel data (2008–2021). Households engaged in nonfarm employment, either exclusively or combined with farming, have higher incomes and lower poverty than farming-only households. Its central contribution is to distinguish two distributional channels: rising nonfarm income among existing participants is associated with higher inequality, whereas broader participation in nonfarm employment is associated with lower inequality.
The third essay examines whether participation in Malawi's Farm Input Subsidy Program is associated with reduced household poverty, using four waves of panel data (2010–2020). Input coupon redemption is associated with higher per capita income and with lower poverty incidence, depth, and severity. However, income gains are larger among better-resourced households, and redemption is associated with a reallocation of labor toward farming and nonfarm self-employment — particularly among women — and away from wage work.
Taken together, the essays show that inclusive rural transformation depends less on the sheer creation of jobs or gains in agricultural productivity than on whether emerging opportunities are decent, broadly accessible, and able to reach households with fewer complementary resources. The binding constraint is not the existence of opportunities, but unequal access to the good ones. Rural poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa is therefore not a choice between agriculture and nonfarm employment, but a challenge of improving job quality, broadening access to remunerative activities, and designing agricultural support that reaches poorer households.