Casual Friday Development Seminar - Brown Bag Seminar

Du 10/05/2024 de 13:00 à 14:00

R1-09

FIETZ Katharina (GIGA)

Improving employment quality in Africa’s small firms: Evidence from Côte d‘Ivoire

Employment quality in many micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) remains low in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper assesses the impact of a light-touch consulting programme with a decent work component for MSMEs in Côte d'Ivoire on employment quality. While the programme itself did not reduce any costs beyond the provision of information, it served as a reminder to employers of their legal obligations and the potential benefits associated with providing decent employment standards. We find that the consulting intervention had a positive impact on employment quality at 6 and 18 months after implementation. For example, the share of employees paid minimum wages increases by 9.2 percentage points 18 months post-intervention. Unusually for an RCT in this area, we collect information from both business owners and dependent workers to create a unique matched employer-employee dataset across multiple time points. This enables us to assess the effects of an enterprise-level intervention from an employee perspective and examine discrepancies between worker- and employer-based reports. We thus identify that those who benefit most from the programme are less experienced employees and employees working in firms outside the economic capital, Abidjan.