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The Southern African Development Community III – Education And Labour Market

The Southern African Development Community is made up of sixteen countries and all countries on the continent with territory below five degrees south. The fifteen other countries are linked to South Africa in many ways and constitute our ‘near abroad’. South Africans should know more about them than they often do, and the purpose of this brief series is to set the current state of development in its various aspects: demographic, economic, political and social. This brief focuses on the region’s rates of education and it labour market.
The Southern African Development Community III – Education And Labour Market

Introduction: the Human Development Index

The United Nations Human Development Index is the geometric mean of the three indices. The health dimension is assessed by life expectancy at birth, the education dimension is measured by mean of years of schooling for adults aged 25 years and more and expected years of schooling for children of school entering age. The standard of living dimension is measured by gross national income per capita. The median value for the top 30 countries was world was 0.74 in 2019, while the median value for SADC countries is 0.58.

Table 1 sets out the HDI for the sixteen SADC countries.

Table 1

Human Development Index

Countries

0.700 and higher

Mauritius, Seychelles, Botswana, South Africa

Between 0.600 and 0.699

Namibia, Eswatini

Between 0.500 and 0.599

Zambia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Comoros, Tanzania, Madagascar, Lesotho

Less than 0.500

Malawi, DRC, Mozambique

Only Mauritius and Seychelles have HDI values above the world median.

Education

The net enrolment rate is the number of enrolments at appropriate ages as a percentage of all children of the same ages in each phase of school education. Net enrolment rates at the last reported year between 2014 and 2019 are presented here. There are gaps in the data. The median net enrolment rate at the primary level for 13 countries was 97.6%, at the lower secondary level was 11 countries was 82.6% and at the higher secondary level was 58.1%. Mozambique and Tanzania were the only countries reported to have lower than a 50% net enrolment rate at lower secondary and higher secondary levels, joined by Madagascar and Malawi at the higher secondary level. The consequence is that the median literacy among the 15-24 year age group is 86% among 15 reporting countries. Table 2 sets out literacy rates by country.

Table 2

Literacy rates

15-24

Countries

90% and above

Namibia, Mauritius, Botswana, Eswatini, South Africa, Zambia

80 – 89%

Lesotho. Tanzania, DRC

Less than 80%

Comoros, Angola, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique

Missing

Seychelles, Zimbabwe

The median expenditure on education as a percentage of total government expenditure across 15 countries was 18.3%, with Eswatini, Tanzania and Botswana above 20%. Aggregate enrolment in vocational secondary education among 13 reporting countries was 1.7 million, and aggregate enrolment in tertiary education among 13 countries reporting was 2.6 million, with South Africa accounting for 46% of them.

The labour market

The population of working age (between 15 and 64) in SADC countries (excluding Seychelles) was 195 million in 2019. Of these, 76.2% were economically active, creating a labour force of 149 million. Labour force participation rates vary considerably across countries, as Table 3 shows.

Table 3

LFPR

Countries

80% and above

Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Tanzania, Angola, Mozambique, Botswana, Malawi

70.0 - 79.9%

Lesotho, Zambia

60.0 - 69.9%

Mauritius, DRC, Namibia, South Africa

Below 60%

Eswatini, Comoros

In turn, 90.6% or 135 million were working. Open unemployment rates by country are presented in Table 4.

Table 4

Unemployment rate

Countries

Less than 10%

Madagascar, Tanzania, DRC, Mozambique, Malawi, Mauritius, Comoros, Angola

10-20%

Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia

Above 20%

Lesotho, Botswana, Eswatini. South Africa

Of the employed people, 3.0% are employers, 29.3% are employees, 50.3% own account workers and 17.4% contributing family members. 55.5% are employed in agriculture, 10.0% in industry (mining, manufacturing, utilities and construction) and 34.5% in services. The percentage of own account and family workers is closely associated with the percentage employed in agriculture as Figure 1 shows. Most farming is subsistence/peasant farming. There are some own account and family workers in services as well.

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Earnings

Incomplete data exist on:

  1. Average agricultural output per worker per month (in countries where more than 40% of workers are employed in agriculture).
  2. The average monthly wage among employed agricultural workers
  3. The average monthly wage among employed workers in elementary occupations
  4. The average monthly wage among employed workers in private households.

Table 5 sets out the information in US dollars at current exchange rates for the latest observations from 2015 onwards. The three small island economies of Comoros, Mauritius and Seychelles are excluded.

The data show the following:

  1. The opportunity cost of removing a worker from subsistence agriculture was about US $ 30 per month in the south, and roughly double that in the northern countries of Angola, DRC and Tanzania.
  2. The remaining columns can be taken as indications of the unskilled wage, though agricultural wages considered as such will be upwardly biased by the inclusion of skilled agricultural workers, especially in Eswatini, Namibia and Zambia.

Table 5

Country

Agricultural output per worker

Average monthly wage - agriculture

Average monthly wage –elementary occupations

Average monthly wage – private households

Unemployment

Rate (%)

Angola

81

     

9.6

Botswana

     

103

22.6

DRC

46

     

3.4

Eswatini

 

201

144

72

22.7

Lesotho

27

94

119

112

22.4

Madagascar

32

39

32

20

1.8

Malawi

26

     

5.8

Mozambique

37

     

3.4

Namibia

 

244

 

94

19.9

South Africa

   

193

 

29.2

Tanzania

77

   

62

2.1

Zambia

17

120

99

57

12.0

Zimbabwe

30

     

16.9

Sources

  • IMF World Economic Outlook Database, April 2021
  • World Bank Development Indicators
  • ILO, ILOSTAT Database

Conclusion

Apart from the three small island economies, the SADC labour market accords with the Lewis model[1], in terms of which labour is increasingly withdrawn from peasant agriculture and re-employed in unskilled work elsewhere as development proceeds. There is one important qualification: the Lewis model did not allow for unemployment, which is high in all SADC countries with a relatively small agricultural sector. It will take a long time for the transfer to complete and, in the intervening period, there will be little upward pressure on the unskilled wage. Meanwhile, secondary education, in particular, has reached fairly advanced levels and net enrolments can be expected to continue to rise. Unless SADC economies can grow very fast, disappointed expectations on the part of the young are bound to increase.

Charles Simkins
Head of Research
charles@hsf.org.za

Annexure – Supporting tables

Table 1

 

Human Development Index

Net enrolment rate

Youth literacy rate

Government expenditure education

Primary

Lower secondary

Upper secondary

 

2019

%

%

%

15-24

% of total

Angola

0.581

     

77.4

8.7

Botswana

0.735

88.9

   

97.5

20.5

Comoros

0.554

81.9

80.8

50.1

78.3

13.3

Democratic Republic of Congo

0.480

     

85.0

14.0

Eswatini

0.611

83.7

97.2

83.8

95.5

24.8

Lesotho

0.527

97.6

82.6

66.1

86.6

13.9

Madagascar

0.528

97.7

70.0

36.2

74.1

19.8

Malawi

0.483

98.1

81.4

31.1

72.9

15.8

Mauritius

0.804

98.6

95.3

79.0

99.0

18.7

Mozambique

0.456

97.6

56.9

31.1

70.9

17.9

Namibia

0.646

98.4

91.5

 

99.1

11.7

Seychelles

0.796

97.6

99.5

81.9

   

South Africa

0.709

89.0

85.6

79.3

95.3

19.5

United Republic of Tanzania

0.529

86.6

28.3

14.2

85.8

20.6

Zambia

0.584

85.1

   

92.1

17.0

Zimbabwe

0.571

         

Median

0.576

97.6

82.6

58.1

86.2

18.3

Sources

  • United Nations Human Development Index
  • UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Table 2

 

Population 15-64 (Thousands)

Labour force participation rate (%)

Labour force (Thousands)

Unemployment rate (%)

Employment (Thousands)

Agricultural employment

Own account and family employment

 

2019

2019

2019

2019

2019

(%)

(%)

Angola

16307

83.1

13543

9.6

12243

50.7%

73.7%

Botswana

1426

80.7

1151

22.6

891

19.9%

21.5%

Comoros

492

48.0

236

8.1

217

34.4%

57.6%

Democratic Republic of Congo

44284

66.8

29577

3.4

28571

64.3%

77.3%

Eswatini

669

56.3

376

22.7

291

12.0%

33.0%

Lesotho

1209

79.1

956

22.4

742

44.3%

46.5%

Madagascar

15251

90.7

13837

1.8

13588

64.1%

83.4%

Malawi

10046

80.2

8061

5.8

7593

76.3%

60.9%

Mauritius

897

67.7

607

6.3

569

6.0%

16.2%

Mozambique

16025

82.5

13217

3.4

12768

70.2%

81.7%

Namibia

1485

63.0

936

19.9

750

21.9%

31.7%

Seychelles

             

South Africa

38414

61.4

23568

29.2

16686

5.3%

10.7%

United Republic of Tanzania

31077

87.6

27210

2.1

26639

65.1%

80.9%

Zambia

9534

77.6

7397

12.0

6509

49.6%

73.2%

Zimbabwe

8055

99.9

8043

16.9

6684

66.2%

68.4%

Total

195172

 

148716

9.4

134741

   

Median

 

76.2

         

Mean

         

55.5%

67.7%

Sources

  • United Nations World Population Prospects, 2019
  • ILO, ILOSTAT Database
  • Own calculations

[1] Lewis, W. Arthur (1954). "Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labor". The Manchester School. 22 (2): 139–91