Early life human-capital investments in Sub-Saharan Africa

This article focuses on three general dimensions of support for human-capital development of Sub-Saharan African children under five years old: nurturing care, nutrition, and preprimary programs. We simulate the Costs of Inaction of under-investments in these three dimensions of early life human capital. For preprimary programs we also simulate the long-run economic losses due to program closures during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our results suggest that: (i) the Costs of Inaction of not implementing nutritional programs for all stunted children 0–2 years of age is close to 3 % of GDP in some countries with high prevalences of stunting; (ii) the Costs of Inaction of not reaching universal coverage in preprimary is 1.6 % of GDP on average for the region; (iii) the Costs of Inaction as a share of GDP of not expanding home-visits programs to children 3–5 years considered developmentally not on track is 2.6 % of GDP, on average for the region; and (iv) the costs of reducing preprimary school participation due to COVID-19 ranges from 0.1 % of GDP to 6.0 % of GDP depending on pre-pandemic preprimary participation rates.