What President Obama didn’t see on his trip to Africa

On his fourth trip to Africa, President Obama celebrated a changing continent. A change that he did not see, however, was growing numbers of workers in jobs that pay good wages and offer some employment security. In fact, except for a few high-tech entrepreneurs in Kenya and the staff of a U.S.-sponsored food supplement plant in Ethiopia it is unlikely he saw many Africans engaged in modern, high productivity jobs at all. That is because, despite nearly 20 years of solid GDP growth, Africa’s economies are creating too few jobs in the sectors that count: those with output per worker high enough to offer decent wages and a path out of poverty. More worrying still, the fastest growers are creating the fewest jobs (see Figure

1). Ethiopia and Kenya, the two countries on this visit, are among the region’s least successful countries in converting economic growth into employment growth. This is not how economic transformation is supposed to work.  For More Readd Here