Evidence for Jobs, Growth, and Livelihoods

Textile industry employer and employees looking at laptop having a production meeting

Overview

J-PAL Africa’s Jobs and Livelihoods portfolio focuses on identifying and scaling strategies that enable firms to become more productive, reach larger markets, create jobs, and improve livelihoods.

For decades, formal employment in Africa has remained stuck at around fifteen percent. Most people work in small, informal businesses, including half of young Africans with tertiary education. One reason is that the continent has too few growing firms that can create stable, productive jobs: around 230 million Africans are self-employed, while only about five million businesses employ five or more wage workers.

Firms face interconnected barriers to growth, including limited access to capital, skills, technology, infrastructure, and markets. Even firms that can increase production may struggle to find sufficient demand, reach higher-value customers, or sustain growth over time.

We work with governments, development partners, implementing organizations, and firms to design, test, and improve policies that address these constraints. By combining policy engagement, program design, technical assistance, and rigorous research, we aim to generate practical evidence on how African economies can achieve more productive and job-rich growth.

What we do:

  • Support high-potential growth initiatives: We work with governments, funders, and private sector partners to identify and co-develop programs that help growth-oriented firms expand, enter new markets, increase exports, or integrate into higher-value supply chains.
  • Embed evidence into program design: We incorporate rigorous evaluation and data-driven learning into new and existing programs, using randomized evaluations and strong quasi-experimental methods where appropriate.
  • Provide policy responsive technical assistance: We help partners apply existing evidence, strengthen program design and targeting, and adapt implementation in response to real-time learning.
  • Build the evidence base on jobs and growth: We support research on what enables firms to grow and create jobs, and on how firm-level interventions affect workers, competing firms, local markets, and the wider economy.

Focus areas

  • Market access and export promotion: Connecting firms to larger and higher-value markets, including domestic, regional, and international buyers, to unlock demand, investment, and learning.
  • Firm capabilities and technology: Strengthening firms’ managerial, operational, and technological capabilities through tailored consulting, expert support, and scalable alternatives to conventional business training.
  • Targeting growth-oriented firms: Identifying firms with the potential and ambition to expand, and improving how governments and funders allocate support among them.
  • Financing for growth: Expanding access to financial instruments suited to firms that are ready to invest and scale but remain underserved by traditional lenders.
  • Growth policy and coordination: Helping governments design coherent industrial, trade, investment, and firm-support policies, and examining how infrastructure, regulation, and public institutions shape firm growth.

Where we work

The workstream is led by J-PAL Africa and focuses primarily on Sub-Saharan Africa, while drawing on evidence and partnerships from other low- and middle-income regions. We collaborate with national and subnational governments, development partners, researchers, implementing organizations, and private-sector actors.

Current and upcoming work

  • Co-developing market access programs that connect firms with regional and international buyers and embed learning into export promotion efforts
  • Testing scalable approaches to strengthening firm capabilities, management practices, and technology adoption
  • Improving how growth-oriented firms are identified and selected for financial and technical support
  • Working with governments to integrate evidence into industrial, trade, investment, and employment strategies
  • Studying how firm-level programs affect jobs, workers, competing firms, and local markets

Partner with us:

  • We collaborate with governments, funders, firms, and implementing organizations interested in designing and testing ambitious, evidence-informed growth initiatives in Africa.
  • To learn more or explore opportunities for collaboration, please contact Julia Kaufman at [email protected]. 
  • This workstream has received initial support from Coefficient Giving as part of J-PAL’s broader work on promoting export growth with evidence, with Academic Lead David Atkin.
     

Evidence and other resources