News
Posthumus Board Member Jutta Bolt receives ERC Consolidator Grant
In December 2025, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to Jutta Bolt, Professor of Global Economic History at the University of Groningen and Board Member of the N.W. Posthumus Institute for her research proposal Africa@Work (AWORK). Through Consolidator Grantsm the ERC aimt to support cutting-edge research at universities and research centres.
Through this research project, Jutta aims to examine how work and livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa have evolved over 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. It addresses 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 our understanding of 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, enabling analysis of when workers shifted out of agriculture, how informal and formal employment evolved, and how economic change varied across regions.
The N.W. Posthumus Institute congratulates Jutta with this Consolidator Grant!
