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Reducing human capital gap in Burkina Faso: the case education

The World Bank's Human Capital Index measures the sum of knowledge, skills and health that an individual accumulates over a lifetime, enabling him or her to achieve his or her potential as a productive member of society. This index shows that human capital in Burkina Faso is low. It ranks the country 144th out of 157 countries in the world with a score of 0.37 on a scale from 0 to 1, a score that is lower than the sub-Saharan African average (0.40). This means that a child born in Burkina Faso today will be 37 per cent as productive when he or she grows as he or she could be if he or she had a full education and good health.

The first challenge is to increase human capital. Indeed, only 34.59% of Burkinabè can read and write. Similarly, basic primary education is not yet universal, although significant efforts have been made to reduce the primary school enrolment rate from 45.02% in 2000 to 93.65% in 2017. The secondary school enrolment rate, which stood at 38.12% in 2017, remained less than 50% in the same year. As for tertiary education, only 6% of Burkinabè are enrolled in it when we look at the figures available for 2017.

These data from the World Bank's World Development Indicators indicate that policy makers must increase human capital. Several solutions are available to them. They can increase education by improving the quality of education-related services, increasing transport connectivity to facilitate access to essential services and the provision of essential inputs to schools, reducing unemployment, combating child labour, improving access to electricity, improving the quality of governance including political stability and violence and terrorism.

Another challenge is to improve the quality of education. The content of children's learning is more important than the length of their studies. In addition, nearly 60% of primary school pupils in developing countries do not reach the minimum level of competence during their apprenticeship. Similarly, social and behavioral skills such as teamwork skills, empathy, conflict resolution and relationship management that enrich an individual's human capital are absent from training programs. Skills such as guts have economic benefits that are sometimes as important as those associated with cognitive abilities. Policy makers can remedy this through teacher training, motivations in terms of salaries and more, by equipping students with textbooks and educational tools. The development of foreign languages such as English and computer skills are also necessary.

The changing nature of work in Burkina Faso: what the government can do to prepare and support workforces in Burkina Faso

In a globalized world, the evolution of work requires increasingly sophisticated skills that are necessary for the economic transformation of our societies. However, how already shown in the first theme to reduce the human capital deficit, particularly in education, is a first step. Greater efforts are needed because countries must be able to keep pace with innovation. To this end, it is necessary to place emphasis on training and research at the teaching level. To do so, the country must invest heavily in higher education with a greater emphasis on scientific subjects such as information and communication technologies, engineering, services, mathematics, health sciences.