Decent Rural Employment
Over three quarters of the world’s poor live in rural areas. Most depend on agriculture and their own labour to earn a living. However, rural employment opportunities are often precarious, informal, poorly remunerated and even hazardous.
Poverty and hunger cannot be eradicated without addressing the inadequacy of employment conditions and opportunities in rural areas. FAO works to generate decent farm and non-farm employment, including by supporting responsible investments in agriculture and food systems and inclusive policy dialogue.
FAO influences global, regional and national processes on key issues such as youth employment, migration, child labour, green jobs, working conditions, and availability of data and evidence. FAO proactively supports governments in the formulation of decent rural employment policies, strategies and programmes, targeting vulnerable groups, particularly youth, women, migrants and children. To achieve this, FAO partners with other UN agencies, civil society, producer organizations, academia and the private sector.
Key messages
Revitalising rural economies and promoting decent rural employment and workforce development is essential to address the adverse drivers of migration, reduce inequality and end poverty and hunger.
The drivers for change should be identified on both the labour demand and supply side. Greater investments in agri-food value chain and private sector development are critical for rural job creation, alongside investments in skills development and social protection.
Across developing regions, the working-age population is growing. This creates an enormous challenge, but also an opportunity to benefit from a huge demographic dividend. In Africa, for example, almost 200 million rural youth are expected to enter the labour market over the next 15 years.
They must also boost the income of rural families through skills development, technical support and access to inputs, markets and credit. The latter would also be critical to end the economic dependence on child labour, which still affects 112 million boys and girls only in agriculture.
After significant gains in the second half of 2020, the job recovery stalled during 2021, with a loss in terms of global hours worked equivalent to 125 million full-time jobs when compared to the pre-crisis benchmark (source: ILO). The negative impact has been disproportionately high for the most vulnerable workers, including youths, women, informal workers, migrants, and seasonal workers, which demands targeted interventions to guarantee inclusive recovery paths. Millions of children are pushed into labour as households struggle to cope with food insecurity, lost income, labour shortage due to limitation of movement, and deteriorating livelihoods.
As a leading institution of global agri-food governance, FAO supports member countries in advancing decent rural employment and strengthening institutional and human capacities on this topic. It advocates for attention to employment issues and a decent work environment for all those involved in agrifood systems at all levels.
Featured resources
FAO Policy Series: Decent Rural Employment
26/07/2016
Peter Wobst, Senior Programme Officer of the FAO Strategic Programme on Rural Poverty Reduction together with Ileana Grandelis, Rural Employment Officer...