State of Africa’s Human Capital and Introduction to Part 3

To present an overview of the state of human capital in African countries, some data and statistics on Africa’s population and the performance of African countries on different available global human capital indexes were summarily analyzed in this chapter. On the average, with few exceptions of countries such as Seychelles and Mauritius, African countries generally rank poorly on many of the indexes. Despite the diverse methodological approaches and human capital measures and indicators used, most African countries came in at the bottom of the global rankings. Apart from the ranking positions, African countries also earned low scores on the indexes. Overall, these rankings reflect the poor state of human capital, its development, and acquisition, across African countries, and call for some urgent actions for the potential demographic dividends to be realized. This chapter concludes by introducing the final part of the book.