Description of data collection
Given the lack of information on employment prospects of graduates of Guinean institutions of agricultural higher education, a telephone surveys was done of recent graduates to determine their employment status and the key factors that affect the probability of being employed. The data on graduates covered all the main agricultural higher education institutions in Guinea: the Institute for Agricultural and Veterinary Science Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (ISAV) at Faranah, the National Schools for Agriculture and Livestock Production (ENAE) at Macenta, Tolo, Koba and Kankan, and the National School for Water and Forestry Technicians (ENATEF) at Mamou. All the ENAE locations are public institutes under the tutelage of the Guinean Ministry of Employment, Technical Education and Vocational Training.
ISAV is the only public agricultural university in Guinea. It has a faculty of about 115 full-time teaching and research staff to support a 4-year academic program. The institute is composed of seven departments: Agronomy, Agroforestry, Rural Economy, Water and Forestry, Animal Science, Rural Engineering, and Extension. While enrollment varies from year to year depending on government policies and other factors, as of 2007, the total student body was approximately 6,725, with women representing 21% (Diallo, 2007).
The main course of study within the ENAE culminates in a degree awarded after 3 years of studies. The ENAE offer two types of diplomas (or degrees): type "A" and type "B". The first type of diplomas is geared toward the graduates of the public school system at the "Brevet" level (equivalent to ninth grade in the US system) and results in graduates earning a degree in the areas of Agricultural or Livestock Technical Assistants. The second type of diplomas targets high school graduates (or baccalaureate), which aims at conferring degrees of Agricultural or Livestock Technical Controllers.
The Ecole Nationale des Agents Techniques des Eaux et Forets (ENATEF) was created in 1991 in Mamou, Guinea with support from Swiss Aid. The main objective of the ENATEF is to train Forestry Technicians Agents in the field of rural development. ENATEF has a three year program and is targeted at public school graduates with the "Brevet" diploma. Access is reserved for graduates who pass the national entry examination.
In the case of ISAV, data was used from phone survey conducted in August 2013 by a team of instructors and students at ISAV, and with a technical supervision from Purdue University. It should be noted that the ISAV survey was conducted for an evaluation of ISAV before this study of graduate employment prospects started. Therefore, the ISAV questionnaire was missing two questions that, from experience, seem to be essential: a question on informal employment for graduates having no work in the formal sector, and a question on their level of English proficiency. A representative sample was randomly selected, composed of 10% of the 4,125 ISAV graduates identified during the past five years. A questionnaire was developed and administered to the graduates included in the sample via phone calls (Ouraich et al., 2015). Because phone surveys are a novelty in Guinea, almost 100% of called graduates responded to the interview call.
For the case of ENAE and ENATEF, the same procedure was adopted for the data collection on graduates, except that an almost complete census of the graduates was done. All graduates for whom a mobile phone number was available were contacted. Due to modest number of ENAE and ENATEF graduates interviews were done with all the identified graduates from those institutions, instead of a sample. In general, the number of graduates in the last five years is around one hundred for each ENAE campus. A questionnaire was developed and administered via cell phone (Ouraich et al., 2015). In a second step, the survey data was used to estimate probit models. This step allows identification of the main factors affecting the probability of obtaining employment. The data derived from the telephone survey provides information on a number of indicators identified as having a potential impact on the integration capacity on the labor market such as gender, the institution the student graduated from, specialization, knowledge and technical skills, level of mastery of foreign languages, etc.
For the second objective, a field investigation of historical and potential employers of ISAV, ENAE, and ENATEF graduates was conducted in all four regions of Guinea. Based on a questionnaire developed by the technical supervision team of Purdue University (Ouraich et al., 2015), the data collection was performed based on the face-to-face interviews with the representatives of the identified institutions. Interviews with employers were conducted in and around large urban areas in Guinea and include Conakry, N'zérékoré, Kankan, Kindia, Mamou and Labé. Traditional employers of ISAV, the ENAE and ENATEF graduates include: governmental departments within the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Higher Education, and Ministry of Employment, Technical Education and Vocational Training; higher institutes and of technical training in agriculture, including ISAV and the ENAE; the Agricultural Research Institute of Guinea (IRAG); primary and secondary schools (public and private); private building and civil engineering companies; the agricultural livestock operations (mainly poultry farms); cooperatives and farmers associations, and private farms. Among the potential employers of ISAV, the ENAE and ENATEF graduates, mining companies as well as NGOs and community organizations were included.
Survey results: A descriptive analysis
ISAV
The ISAV sample in the analysis represents about 10% of graduates in the lists of graduates numbering 4,125. Therefore, the sample size in the study amounted to about 411 graduates. The size of the final sample for the descriptive statistics and the probit analysis was 402 observations due to the elimination of observations with incomplete data. In the ISAV survey, male graduates represent 75% and women graduates represent 25%. This is roughly the same as the male/female ratio in the current student populations at the Guinean institutions. Formal sector employment rate is 34% for all ISAV graduates contacted, with 37% for male graduates and 25% for female graduates. While having one third of graduates employed would be a dismal outcome for industrialized country agricultural universities, it is similar to the graduate employment rates widely reported in the African media and documented in Burkina Faso.
ISAV graduates are not evenly distributed across departments. Four of seven departments represent jointly more than 80% of all graduates. The distribution of graduates from the four largest departments is: Rural Economy (28%), Agronomy (19%), Rural Engineering (19%), and Water and Forestry (15%). The remaining departments are much smaller representing only 20% of graduates with Agroforestry (9%), Animal Science (7%) and Extension (4%).
When the distribution is compared across gender, the distribution of female graduates across departments is more concentrated than that of male graduates. The share of female graduates in three out of seven departments is greater than 30% and they are as follows: Water and Forestry (39%), Rural Economy (35%), and Agroforestry (31%). In addition, two departments represent jointly 62% of total female graduates: Rural Economy (39%) and Water and Forestry (23%). In terms of employment by department, the highest rates of employment are exhibited by the departments of Rural Engineering (41%), Water and Forestry (39%), Rural Economy (38%) and Animal Science (38%). These departments represent jointly 79% of all employed graduates.
ENAE
In the ENAE sample, men represent 74% and women represent 26%. Male graduates represent the 81% in the employed ENAE graduates. In terms of employment rates, 14% of all graduates are employed irrespective of gender. When accounting for gender, employment rate reached 13 and 19% for female and male graduates, respectively. Unlike the Nordman and Pasquier-Doumer (2014) study, this study showed that vocational school graduates have a somewhat lower percentage of graduates employed than their colleagues who graduated from the agricultural university. In terms of employment by degree program, the highest rate of employment was exhibited by the Agriculture B (25%). For the rest of the programs, the proportion of employed graduates was below the 20% threshold and is 18% for Breeding B, 16% for Breeding A and 14% for Agriculture A. Self-employment varies widely among the ENAE campuses; Kankan – 11%; Koba – 22%; Macenta – 20%, and Tolo – 63%. The high share of self-employed among the Tolo ENAE graduates is in part due to the fact that many graduates use the school's farm plots as a start-up location for their agricultural businesses.
The ENATEF data is based on a list of graduates during the past five years. The size of the final sample for the descriptive statistics and probit analysis is 78 observations. In the ENATEF data, male graduates are 74% of the sample, whereas female graduates account for 26%. Male graduates represent the majority in the employed respondents, and which is similar to the findings for ISAV and ENAE graduates. Overall, the rate of formal sector employment is 26%. In addition, 14% report informal sector employment. One hypothesis concerning the relatively higher employment percentage at ENATEF, as compared to the ENAE, is that the Swiss donor resources have increased the quality of the education at ENATEF and employers are responding to that quality by employing more of the ENATEF graduates. As one informal indicator of that quality, the interview team for this study indicated that the ENATEF student volunteers were substantially more articulate in the phone surveys than their ENAE counterparts.
Gender
Female graduates represent 19% of the overall graduate pool included in the surveys who are currently employed. For female ISAV graduates, 24% are employed. The number is 30% for ENATEF and 11% for the ENAE graduates. Among the ENAE locations, the rate of employment for female graduates in the formal sectors varies: 9% at ENAE-Tolo, 17% at ENAE-Koba and 20% at ENAE-Kankan. None of the female graduates from ENAE-Macenta are currently employed in the formal and informal sectors. The main reason for this situation appears to be that 20 of the 23 of the Macenta women in the sample are from the 2013 cohort. The data from all the schools indicates that graduates often require several years to find formal sector jobs. Consequently, it is not surprising that recently graduated Macenta women are unemployed.
The private sector is the major employer of female graduates. Nevertheless, the employment dynamic within the female pool of graduates offers substantial differences when compared with the general population. Female graduates rarely report self-employed status. Among those with jobs, the private sector employs 58% of female graduates from ISAV, 73% from the ENAE, and 100% from ENATEF. Within the ENAE, the share of employed female graduates working in the private sector is as follows: 50% at ENAE-Kankan, 80% at ENAE-Koba and 100% at ENAE-Tolo.
Employer perspectives
The majority of employers interviewed were from the for-profit-private sector (31 of the 70 interviewed employers). The public sector follows with 25 employers and finally the NGO sector with 14 employers. The employer hiring plans suggest that demand for employees with university or technical school degrees should double in the next few years with larger increases in some geographic areas. For example, the number of employees in the regions of Mamou and Forécariah is projected to increase by 389 and 288%. The regions of Conakry, Boffa, Labé and Kankan follow with projected increase of 161, 108, 104 and 103%, respectively. The rest of the regions show increases under the 100% threshold: 98% at Coyah, 73% at N'zérékoré, 68% at Dubréka, 61% at Macenta, 59% at Pita and 47 at Kindia.
In terms of the qualitative assessment of the graduates from ISAV, the ENAE and ENATEF by employers, the main conclusion that emerges from the analysis of the surveys is the lack of practical knowledge and experience. According to the analysis, 87% of employers are critical of the gaps in terms of mastery of the technical packages at the farm level. In addition, a majority of employers mention also that they are unsatisfied with the graduates' skills level in terms of drafting technical and analytical reports (69%), oral and written communication (46%), and computer literacy (37%). When comparing the graduates of ISAV, ENAE and ENATEF, the employers' surveys indicate that the graduates from ISAV are in general well versed theoretically, but lack practical experience on the field; and vice-versa for the graduates from the ENAE. Additionally, the ENAE graduates are appreciated by employers for their willingness to relocate to rural areas, whereas the ISAV graduates showcase a strong bias in favor of urban centers. Overall, the employer comments about ISAV, ENAE and ENATEF graduates is similar to those reported in other studies of African agricultural employers (Breazeale et al., 2004; Blackie et al., 2009; Scheltema et al., 2014).
From the results of the descriptive analysis, it is clear that the employability of graduates coming from academic and technical training in Guinea is affected by a number of factors. To better understand the effect of variables identified on the probability of being employed a single equation probit model was estimated to investigate the effect of identified factors influencing the probability of being employed for the graduates. The data collected through the surveys cover a number of explanatory variables that might affect the probability of being employed for graduates (e.g. gender, degree granting institution, field of study, etc). The probit model to estimate the probability of employment for graduates is expressed as follows:
with the vector denoting the independent variables affecting the probability of being employed and the cumulative function of the normal distribution. To this end, the analysis used the econometric estimation package “glm” and the function “mfx” to extract the marginal effects derived from the R econometric program analysis (R Core Team, 2013).
First, a pooled probit model (model 1) was estimated using data from the three telephone surveys and covering the variables in common in all three data sets. Table 1 summarizes the variables used in the model. The gender and school variables were based on institutional records, not survey responses (Ouraich et al., 2015). In a second step, a disaggregated probit model was estimated by separating the data derived from the three telephone surveys between those from ISAV and those from ENAE and ENATEF. The data derived from the ENAE and ENATEF surveys will be jointly analyzed given the relatively small number of observations associated with ENATEF survey. For the ISAV "probit" model (model 2), variables reported in Table 2 are used. The only difference is the ENAE and ENATEF variables are replaced by a categorical variable, , for each department within ISAV. The reference category is , which takes the value 1.
For the ENAE and ENATEF "probit" model (model 3), a similar approach to the ISAV "probit" was adopted. In the ENAE and ENATEF model, the ISAV department variables are replaced by degree program categorical variables ( , , , and ). is the reference category for the ENAE and ENATEF degree program categorical variables. A variable for English language skills is added as . It takes the value of 1 when the respondent’s self assessment is without English skills, 2 if the respondent's is at the beginner level, and 3 when the respondent indicates that they have the capacity to read and write.
