This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Sub-Saharan Africa's rural population is growing rapidly, and more young people are entering the labour market every year. This raises serious policy questions. Can rural economies absorb enough job seekers? Could better-educated youth transform Africa's rural economies by adopting new technologies and starting businesses? Are policymakers responding to the youth employment challenge? Or will there be widespread unemployment, social instability, and an exodus to cities and abroad? Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa: Beyond Stylized Facts uses survey data to build a nuanced understanding of the constraints and opportunities facing rural youth in Africa. Addressing the questions of Africa's rural youth is currently hampered by major gaps in our knowledge and stylized facts from cross-country trends or studies that do not focus on the core issues. Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa takes a different approach, drawing on household and firm surveys from selected African countries with an explicit focus on rural youth. It argues that a balance between alarm and optimism is warranted, and that Africa's "youth bulge" is not an unprecedented challenge. Jobs in rural areas are limited, but agriculture is transforming and youth are participating, adopting new technologies and running businesses. Governments have adopted youth employment as a priority, but policies often do not address the specific needs of rural populations. Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa emphasizes that by going beyond stylized facts and drawing on more granular analysis, we can design effective policies to turn Africa's youth problem into an opportunity for rural transformation.

Development studies in developing regions such as Southern Africa rely heavily on materials developed by Europeans with a European context. European dominance in development studies emanates from the fact that the discipline was first developed by Europeans. Some argue that this has led to distortions in theory and practice of development in Southern Africa. This book wishes to begin Africa’s expedition to develop proper material to de-Westernize while Africanizing the context of the scholarship of rural development. African Perspectives on Reshaping Rural Development is an essential reference source that repositions the context of rural development studies from the Western-centric knowledge system into an African context in order to solve African-centered problems. Featuring research on topics such as food security, poverty reduction, and community engagement, this book is ideally designed for planners, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, government officials, academicians, and students seeking clarity on theory and practice of development in Africa.

This book applies a range of theories that focus on current concerns in rural Africa. The contributors lay out the conceptualization, analysis, methods, assumptions, perceptions, and ideas considered in each individual case. Specifically, this project inspires research in the field of rural development in Africa through multi-faceted endeavors that promote the ability of planning to uplift people’s well-being and quality of life.

This book highlights the important role of the complex nature of interactions between rural and urban areas in Africa and how this relates to sustainable development on the continent – one with a fast urbanization rate. The volume critiques the widely held assumption of a societal divide where rural areas are mostly agricultural, whilst urban areas engage in industry and services. Contributors provide conceptual arguments and present case studies in Africa which illustrate the complex and multifaceted interdependencies between cities and rural areas, through the flow of natural resources, people, capital, information, goods and services which directly impacts the socio-ecological as well as economic sustainability of these spaces. This volume forms part of an Education for Sustainable Development in Africa (ESDA) book series involving the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability and 8 partner African universities running Master’s Programs in sustainable development. The book series is intended to serve primarily as undergraduate and graduate instruction materials for courses on sustainable development in Africa, as well as policy input to key developmental issues in Africa.

The gestation period of this collection has been lengthy even by academic stan dards. Some of our long-suffering contributors prepared their original drafts for a workshop held in Nairobi in 1967, and although they have all up-dated their contributions they are still essentially reporting on research conducted in the late 1960s. However, we feel that their various findings and analyses of the issues they respectively treat have a continuing validity in our comprehension of the problem of rural development. Other contributions reporting on more recent work have been incorporated at different times since, most of them not commissioned especially for this symposium but all adding something to our understanding of the problem. The slow accumulation of material which makes up this fmal collection parallels an evolution in our own collective thinking, if indeed not that of most students of 'development' over the past decade. The progression has not been towards fmal clarification of the complex and changing East African realities, nor towards formulation of an accepted model for their analysis; rather, it has been marked by the questioning of the initial, somewhat simplistic assumptions with which some of us started out and a continuing debate and widening polar ization of views about the significance of that process of government 'pene tration' of the rural areas which is our focus, about the positive or negative value of 'development' policies in East Africa and, indeed, about the appropri ate theoretical approaches to the study of 'development' in general.