By Lant Pritchett
From the article:
The idea that investing in human capital is central to promoting development has been widely accepted since the 1950s — and the world has seen spectacular progress. Improvements in life expectancy and the expansion of schooling in the developing world have been extraordinary: both have improved more in the past 60 years than the previous 6,000 years of human history.
The World Bank recently announced its much-anticipated Human Capital Project — which signals a renewed emphasis on investing in human capital. But the initiative will only be effective if everyone recognizes the two new challenges the initiative brings to the fore.
First, the new human capital index recognizes that “schooling ain’t learning.” Parents, communities, and countries have always had learning goals for their youth, namely that they acquire the skills and capabilities they will need to be successful adults. However, the international community has often reduced learning goals to goals based on “time served” in a school. In the Millennium Development Goals, for example, the “universal primary completion” goal made no reference to what a child might learn in those years.
This had produced success in schooling, in that nearly every child now has access to and attends school. But, tragically, if you want to find an uneducated child in the world today, the place to find them is in school. Analysis of recent data from surveys of women around the world finds that less than half of adult women who completed only six years of schooling could read a single simple sentence.
While the Sustainable Development Goals reflect both goals for schooling and for learning, the World Bank’s new human capital index uses “learning adjusted school years” and is the first international measure to directly incorporate student learning into an overall index.
Read the full article here.