ERC Consolidator Grant for Jutta Bolt

The Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) is proud to announce that Jutta Bolt has received an ERC Consolidator Grant. The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded this personal grant of two million euros to Bolt for her research on the transformation of employment in Africa between 1920 and 2020. With this grant, the Professor of Global Economic History can fund her team of researchers and support staff for a period of five years.

In her project Africa Work (AWORK), Bolt aims to examine how work and livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have evolved across a century of profound economic, demographic, and social change. Focusing on 33 countries shaped by different colonial legacies and post-independence trajectories, the project reconstructs detailed occupational structures from 1920 to 2020. The project responds to a longstanding empirical gap: although Africa’s workforce is expanding and diversifying, long-run data on employment structures—especially for the early and mid-20th century — are fragmented or unavailable. This limits the ability to understand how labour markets developed, how opportunities emerged, and how structural constraints took shape.

AWORK aims to reconstruct detailed occupational structures from 1920 to 2020 using colonial censuses, labour surveys, and post-independence microdata. The resulting database will capture trends by gender, sector, location, and employment type, making it possible to analyze when workers shifted out of agriculture, how informal and formal jobs evolved, and how economic change varied across regions.

Five themes

The project focuses on five themes. First, it will track long-run shifts in occupational structures across all studied countries, highlighting variations in the timing and nature of labour transitions. Second, it will examine how the expansion of cash-crop agriculture created new opportunities for income generation and skill development, while also shaping labour mobility and constraints. Third, it will analyze the dynamics of urbanization and migration, exploring how cities became sites of both new services and limited industrial growth. Fourth, it will investigate the dual role of informal labour, which remains widespread: as response to limited formal opportunities but also as a setting for entrepreneurship, innovation, and enterprise growth. Finally, it will study long-run gendered labour patterns, showing how women’s economic roles adapted within changing institutional and sectoral contexts.

Jutta Bolt: “Receiving this ERC grant is an extraordinary opportunity to deepen our understanding of how work and livelihoods in Africa have evolved over the past century. With this support, we can finally build the long-run evidence needed to explain why certain employment patterns persist, uncover where new opportunities have emerged, and clarify how these insights can support more inclusive and productive economic futures across the continent. The grant also makes it possible to work closely with partners across Africa to reconstruct a century of change in African labour markets, open up new historical evidence, deepen comparative understanding, and strengthen the research communities committed to improving employment opportunities for the future.”

Importance of European–African Collaboration

AWORK depends on close collaboration between African and European institutions, combining dispersed archival collections with local expertise. The project’s publicly accessible database and in-depth case studies will strengthen research capacity and support more context-specific policy debates on employment, skills, and economic transformation. For this Project, Bolt will be supported by an Advisory Board consisting of Professor Leigh Gardner (London School of Economics, LSE), Doug Gollin (Research Director of Structural Transformation and Economic Growth, STEG), Professor Robert Darko Osei (University of Ghana) and Professor Murray Leibbrandt (University of Cape Town). Furthermore, Bolt aims to expand the cooperation with local academic partners in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Questions? Please contact Jutta Bolt.