Employment Generation In Africa: Learning From Good Practices - Rwanda Report.pdf

The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) project "Employment Generation in Africa - Learning from Good Practices" examines policies and their impact on decent employment creation in six African nations, including Rwanda. FES Rwanda aims to assess the employment situation, government policies, and formulate policy recommendations.

The assessment reveals that the number of employees with decent employment ranges between 587,479 and 3,633,132, with an 8.3% increase in wage employment over the past two decades. Income inequality has decreased from 0.48 in 2000 to 0.42 in 2017, and women's participation in the labor market has increased. The digital industry has grown by 14% annually, contributing 2.44% to economic growth and employing 12,026 people. The National Strategy for Transformation (NST1) projected growth of 11.2% between 2017 and 2020, but the average growth rate was just 6% due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The country is also experiencing a climatic crisis, which negatively impacts employment and the way of life.

Various stakeholders are implementing employment initiatives like the National Professional Internship Program and the Economic Recovery Fund. However, these initiatives face coordination obstacles, information gaps, limited financial resources, human capacity building gaps, limited coverage of women and primary school graduates, and decent work gaps.

To address the decent work agenda, interventions specifically for women and artisanal employment are crucial. Improving coordination mechanisms, integrating decent work, supporting capacity building, enhancing resource mobilization, decentralizing the labor market information system, and integrating social protection into employment-creating operations are also important. Additionally, there is a need to mobilize resources to support trade unions' expansion of coverage and mainstream social protection in employment initiatives.