Africa

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Against the backdrop of major decent work deficits in Africa, the pandemic has hit the region hard, reversing some of the progress in poverty reduction achieved in recent decades.

Before the pandemic, Africa’s labour markets were characterized by widespread informality, working poverty, underemployment and the prevalence of low-productivity work. These structural features, as well as institutional constraints, including limited government capacity and weak social protection systems and social dialogue processes, meant that large shares of the population were extremely vulnerable to the pandemic. World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2021 (ILO 2021a) describes the effects of the crisis’s interaction with these structural issues on workers and enterprises in Africa.

The region’s GDP is estimated to have declined by 1.9percent in 2020, with significant heterogeneity across subregions and country groups,

largely determined by structural characteristics. Tourism-dependent countries were hit hardest, followed by resource-intensive economies (dependent on metals and minerals) and oil exporters; the relatively more diversified non-resource-intensive economies were the least affected in 2020 (AfDB 2021). The employment impact of the pandemic in 2020 is estimated to have amounted to a deficit of 15million jobs in Africa as a whole.4 Added to this are increases in labour underutilization, declines in income and an increase in working poverty.

The most recent ILO estimates show that in this region in 2020 nearly 5million additional workers and their households fell below the extreme working poverty line, increasing the extreme poverty rate by 1.3 percentage points

(see box1.1). These figures only partially reflect the poverty impact of the pandemic, however, since working poverty figures do not fully account for the many poor and near poor individuals who have lost their jobs. The net increase in the number of extreme working poor in 2020 partially offset the net decline in the moderate poor, near poor and non-poor categories. This suggests that income losses from the pandemic have pushed some workers in the moderate working poor and near poor categories deeper into poverty. The African Development Bank (AfDB 2021) has estimated that more than 30.4million Africans fell into extreme poverty in 2020 as a direct consequence of the pandemic, and another 38.7 million may have done so in 2021.

GDP in Africa recovered in 2021, growing by an

estimated 4.9percent. The recovery suffered setbacks in the second half of the year as a new wave of COVID-19–the Delta variant–took its toll, bringing a revival of lockdowns and containment measures. Against the backdrop of slow vaccination progress, the possibility of further COVID-19 waves–including the most recent Omicron variant, which has prompted flight cancellations and travel bans from Southern Africa–could protract the crisis yet further. Other factors that will determine the economic outlook over the medium term include the continuing implementation of fiscal stimulus packages across the continent (or, alternatively, high debt and liquidity shortfalls that would tighten financing conditions and constrain investment), the recovery of tourism, remittances and commodity prices, and the incidence of conflicts or natural disasters (AfDB 2021).

Even if economic growth picks up, a return to the pre-crisis baseline for Africa’s labour market will not be sufficient to repair the damage caused by the pandemic, including the reversal of gains with respect to international

labour standards. In particular, the pandemic has exacerbated some of the root causes of child labour and forced labour–namely, poverty, social marginalization, the lack of universal quality education, and weak social dialogue (ILO 2020b).5 As the thematic section below argues, policies need to address long-standing structural issues in Africa, especially the disconnect between GDP growth and employment growth, if the region is to see significant and sustained improvements in living standards and reduce its vulnerability to future crises.

4 The deficit is the difference between the actual employment level and the employment level that would have occurred if the EPR had remained at its 2019 level in 2020.

5 For instance, an increase in poverty, compounded by school closures and difficulties in labour law enforcement during lockdowns, has resulted in an increase in child labour in Uganda’s construction sector (Oprong 2021).