Employment in Export-Oriented Agricultural Value Chain in Rwanda

This synthesis report is based on work done through the Joint EU-ILO Government of Rwanda project: Strengthening the impact on employment of sectoral and trade policies. It synthesizes findings from the 2017 study Understanding the effects of increased agricultural exports on employment in agricultural value chain in Rwanda, referred to as the “study”. This study estimates the wages and gross profit along the value chains to gauge the potential effects of increased agricultural exports on employment and gross profits in both traditional export value chains (pyrethrum, tea and coffee) and selected value chains developed recently (green beans, cut flowers and essential oils). It also incorporates findings from a baseline study on employment in agricultural value chains, referred to as the “baseline report” (DAI, 2016), and those from an assessment by the International Trade Centre (ITC, 2017) on the potential of export crops in Rwanda. The objective of the baseline study was to assess how many people are employed in the three traditional agricultural export value chains as well as non-traditional products including green beans, cut flowers and essential oils.

This synthesis first describes the methodology used and then gives a description of each value chain and the split of the export added-value among its various players. Finally, it provides an overview of the employment effects along the different value chains and how these could be impacted by increased production for exports, given that as part of the project it was assessed that for coffee, tea and pyrethrum, there is considerable potential for increasing exports.