Rural wage employment in Africa: methodological issues and emerging evidence

This article explores the evidence on rural labour markets and wage employment in sub-Saharan Africa. The article argues that much of the official statistical evidence on rural wage employment is either scarce or unreliable, and discusses a number of hypotheses and reasons for this. A number of alternatives are discussed to overcome the most serious weaknesses of conventional data collection methods and to illustrate their usefulness with selected findings and emerging themes from field research that has attempted to overcome the shortcomings of standard household surveys in rural Africa, in order to capture the nature and dynamics of rural wage employment.