Promoting decent rural employment, by creating new jobs in rural areas and upgrading the existing ones, could be one of the most efficient pathways to reduce rural poverty. This paper systematically investigates the role of decent rural employment on agricultural production efficiency in sub-Saharan African countries, taking Ethiopia and Tanzania as case countries. The analysis applies an output-oriented distance function approach with an estimation procedure that accounts for different technological, demographic, socio-economic, institutional and decent rural employment indicators. Data of the most recent round of Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) for the two countries are used, and a set of indicators are derived to proxy core dimensions of decent rural employment. The findings of our analysis support the idea that integrating decent rural employment aspects in rural development policies and strategies can contribute to improve agricultural production efficiency in sub-Saharan Africa.