Dr. Godius KahyararaEconomics Department

UniversityTanzania

This is a unique survey in African labour market. It aims at collecting wage information from dozens of African countries including Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Niger, Benin, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Southern Sudan. These are countries that I am aware of. I hope there are other countries especially outside Africa that have conducted a similar survey.

The main objective of the survey is to provide comparative wage information along with other labor market information such as worker characteristics, human capital and other key features.

The information from this offline survey provides a comparable country specific evidence of wage level in a country as reported in online surveys and other sources.

The survey is unique in many respects but most importantly;

It is conducted by local experts with adequate local knowledge including language and social settings that can influence wage as well as responses.

There is no data set in Africa that combines several countries from which the same questions are applied to get comparative information.

Microeconomics surveys that can explain stagnated Africa development amid rapid and impressive macroeconomic performance are scarce. Data from this survey can combine macro information and explain in more detail the puzzle of persistent poverty in Africa despite comprehensive reforms from the early 1990s.

The Specialists from Netherlands work in collaboration with local experts in design analysis and reporting. This is very important for capacity strengthening and sustainability of the project.

The survey adopts a participatory approach that ensures the active participation of all key project stakeholders in undertaking this very important assignment.

It is through the participatory approach that various stake holders are given an opportunity to express their feelings, views, ideas and opinions - a process that is key in ensuring the ownership the outcome of the wage survey findings. The research team takes the process through the following steps:

Literature review; A participative survey design and refinement; Data collection - which employs participatory

approaches, including consultation with employers associations and trade unions

Data inputting, cleaning, analysis and report writing;

Sample design  In a survey like this one, sample design is very important. It is only

when sample design is correctly attained that meaningful estimates of the size and characteristics of the wage employees can be attained. For the purpose of this survey the multi-stage stratified sample with multiplicity was adopted.

Multi-stage stratified sample with multiplicity   The sample design of the survey of wage workers presented in this

report, as mentioned above is a multi-stage stratified sampling scheme according to which in the first stage a sample of enumeration areas (Primary Sampling Units) are selected from the sampling frame of a national credible source maintained within statistics offices, chambers of trades, employers associations trade unions and others.

The lists are stratified by region and urban/rural location. The sample areas are selected with probability proportional to size where size is measured in terms of number of population according to a recent population census existing in a country.

In the second stage of sampling, the sample areas lists are used with a fixed size was drawn from the originally determined list of establishments.

  

Three alternative sample sizes were calculated depending on the required level of precision of the final estimates from the following expression

n z / 22 p(1 p)

d2

where z/2

is the value of the standard normal deviate corresponding to the probability /2, p is the fraction to be estimated and d is the accepted margin of errors of the estimate. In the present context, we set at 0.05 corresponding to z/2=1.96, and consider the most conservative value of p, p=0.5, and three different levels of sampling errors, d=0.03, d=0.04 and d=0.05. The resulting sample sizes for each domain are 1067, 600, and 384, respectively. The corresponding results for the two domains were 2134, 1200 and 768 households.

These sample size requirements requires adjustment for the possibility of non-responding employees and the fact that the sample design is not a simple random sample. Thus, allowing for 5% non-response rate and a design effect of 1.7 due to the correlation within enumeration areas, the adjusted sample size requirements for the three levels of sampling areas, in rounded figures, are given below:

Sampling errors Sample size requirement

3% 3,820 workers 4% 2,150 workers 5% 1,370 workers

The final choice of the sample size was based on budget considerations and survey organization within this range of 1,370 till 3,820.

The WageIndicator Surveys aim to draw a random sample in a predefined set of occupations. This set of occupations includes skilled and unskilled occupations in all industries, for the list of occupations. The occupations are selected purposively to reflect the occupational structure, as reflected in the Labour Force Surveys in all these countries.

Second, the occupations are selected to supplement the WageIndicatorweb-survey.

In this regard, the face-to-face survey takes into account the need to include persons in occupations with limited access to internet, as is necessary for the web-survey.

Third, the occupations selection is informed by the need for cross-country comparison with other WageIndicator face-to-face surveys in Africa.

During the fieldwork, in some cases it was easy to identify the respondent’s occupation. In other cases, the respondents were asked their occupation. The supervisors and interviewers in each district are widely experienced in conducting Labour Force Surveys.

The survey covers all districts in a country. The target number of respondents (2000) is distributed across all the districts. At the district level, the quota is distributed across the broad occupational categories. Respondents are then randomly selected by specially trained supervisors and interviewers to ensure every occupation is represented.

So far country reports have been compiled for all the areas where survey is complete. The reports are available in national and international languages, e.g Swahili, Portuguese, English French.

The reports have attracted interests of various stakeholders including policy makers, academia, trade unions, employers associations as well as the general economy.

The alignment of the offline versus online survey results for all countries available makes it possible to examine the real wage trends in all these countries.

It is hereby recommended that more attention be given to make use of this important information.

Policy briefs, Journal Articles and books to assess labor market behavior in a most comparative manner is possible. There are scholars in Africa who can team up with Northern experts to provide more analysis of existing data

In future it should be made possible to follow same workers and do second round of survey to examine the extent of wage changes in these countries

More strategies to disseminate the information is recommended.