PhDs Africa @ Work: Transformation of employment 1920 - 2020

Project 1 examines how urbanisation in Africa has reshaped where people work, the kinds of jobs they do, and the opportunities available to them over the long run. Using population censuses and labour surveys, the project reconstructs long-run changes in the location and structure of employment, tracking rural–urban migration, sectoral shifts, and labour market responses to periods of economic expansion, crisis, and structural adjustment.

Focusing on Zambia, Angola, and Côte d’Ivoire, the project compares how different development paths have produced distinct urban labour markets. In some contexts, urban growth has been driven by natural resource booms, shifting labour away from agriculture into state-related and service activities with limited productivity gains. In others, urbanisation has emerged from rising agricultural productivity or rural pressures, generating more diverse forms of work in trade, transport, and services. The central question is whether urbanisation has translated into productive and sustainable employment, or instead reproduced new forms of vulnerability and informality.

Project 2 examines how gender inequalities in African labour markets emerged, how they evolved over time, and why they remain so persistent. Using population censuses, labour reports, and agricultural surveys, the project reconstructs long-run patterns of women’s and men’s participation across formal employment, informal work, own-account activities, and unpaid family labour, making visible forms of work that were often poorly recorded or overlooked.

Focusing on Kenya, Uganda, and Botswana, the project compares how different economic systems—a settler economy, a peasant cash-crop economy, and a mining-based economy—produced distinct gendered labour regimes. In Kenya, women’s labour was central to settler agriculture yet systematically undervalued; in Uganda, men dominated cash-crop production while women remained concentrated in subsistence farming and local trade; and in Botswana, mining-led growth generated formal employment largely inaccessible to women, pushing them into low-income urban activities. The central question is how these historical labour regimes shaped access to work, income, and security, and why gender gaps in employment persist even as African economies transformed.