This paper aims at providing empirical information about agricultural labour intensities of large commercial farms in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our hope is that this information can be used by Sub-Saharan African governments to design policies and incentives to attract private investors in agriculture conditional on the quantity and quality of employment created, the adoption of productivity enhancing technologies, and the environmental sustainability of the investment.

The paper presents a dataset on wage employment and size of cultivated land from 87 farming companies operating across 18 Sub-Saharan African countries, involved in different farming activities and adopting different agricultural technologies and cultivation methods. On the basis of these empirical observations we derive our discussion of policy implications and conclusions.