Job creation through labour based technology: a case study on road construction.

The poverty problem in Africa is closely related to the lack of adequate productive employment opportunities. The proportion of the population living in poverty is increasing. Regrettably, Africa is the only region in which the proportion of the population living under the poverty line is projected to increase. The development of productive employment has not kept pace with increased labour supply. In Africa, we find a rapidly increasing labour force growing at about 3 per cent annually combined with declining or stagnating levels of wage employment, decreasing real wages and deteriorating working and living conditions. Well-designed and well-implemented labour based infrastructure programmes offer specific advantages to the society in terms of improved access to public markets and increased employment. Such programmes also offer better prospects for small entrepreneurs to establish themselves in the domestic market for civil works. Finally such programmes are attractive to the government as they respond to employment and poverty objectives, increase incomes and standards of living in rural and urban areas, reduce foreign exchange requirement and strengthen the domestic construction sector. This study looks at the efforts that have been made to promote the usage of labour based technology in Tanzania. It looks at the environment under which the technology operates in the construction industry in the country. The key parameters of the study are Labour Based Technology, Labour force, Employment and Poverty. The study shows that there is abundant idle labour in the country that can be made useful if deployed in labour based construction works and in so doing, reducing the level of poverty in the society. It also shows that the efforts on usage of the technology is not enough and this causes it to be unsustainable in the country.