Investing in Human Capital in Africa: A framework for research

Abstract

This essay argues that the existing paradigm in discussions of the acquisition of human capital has been focused on the drive to universal schooling and expanding access and grade attainment. This focus has been quite successful. The expansion of schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the last decades has been impressively rapid, in percentage growth terms much faster than other regions of the world, because SSA at political independence began far behind most other regions.

However, the paradigm needs to shift as “invest in human capital”, which implicitly focuses on the acquisition of valued skills, has mostly been treated as equivalent of “spend on school” and this conceptual elision has produced very mixed results on learning and the creation of cognitive skills, which were, and are, taken to be an important goal of schooling. This section therefore focuses on some facts about schooling and learning with an emphasis on both the question of whether: (i) “Sub- Saharan Africa” has been distinctive as a region; and (ii) the heterogeneity across SSA both in sub-regions and across countries that make generalizations about SSA problematic (if not outright unhelpful).

The conclusion is that there needs to be a shift from the crude “accumulationist” model of “invest in human capital” as exclusively: (i) more years spent in school; and (ii) more spend on school. “Invest” in human capital must mean: (i) acquisition of valued skills, capabilities, dispositions; and (ii) effective spending. This implies three major changes in the research paradigm: (i) stop using “year of schooling” as the major “outcome” to be pursued; (ii) stop using a naïve “education production function” to evaluate impact of inputs towards a systems approach; and (iii) as part of that, work towards a more realistic positive model of the politics of learning